As she approached the children, Maggie saw that Elizabeth, whose smile she’d rendered too sweetly, had her brother’s head locked beneath her arm. Their nurse and the orphanage attendants were nowhere to be seen. Knowing the children as well as she did, Maggie wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that they’d left the poor young women gagged and tied in the shrubbery maze. Sighing, she lifted the hem of her white muslin gown and hurried forward to rescue the shrieking little boy from his sister’s tyranny.
“But he keeps saying he’s the prime minister,” Lizzie declared when Maggie remonstrated her. “But I’m supposed to be the prime minister today. Mamma said I might!”
“But girls can’t be prime ministers,” John insisted. “Papa said so!”
Maggie, recalling similar arguments between herself and the Duke of Rawlings, many years earlier, looked down at John and said, “Why don’t we play something else instead of Parliament today? What would you think about playing a game your cousin Jerry and I used to play, back when he and I were little?”
Lizzie, who had to crane her neck to see Maggie’s face, looked curious. “You mean you were little once?” she asked in disbelief. “But you’re so tall!”
Maggie, trying to hide her annoyance, muttered, “I’m not all that tall.”
“Yes, you are,” John declared. “You’re taller than Papa.”
“I am not taller than your father,” Maggie said, her irritation mounting. “Your mother, maybe. But not your father.”
“You are,” John said staunchly. “Isn’t she, Lizzie?”
Elizabeth looked Maggie up and down and finally said, “No, she isn’t. But she’s still very tall. For a girl, that is.”
Maggie felt herself flush, and then was angry with herself for letting the innocent prattle of children irritate her. She knew she was far too sensitive about her height. So what if she had always been the tallest girl in her school? At least she’d stopped growing. At five feet eight—a height she’d achieved at the age of ten—she was taller than her mother and all of her sisters, and only a little shorter than her father.
But there were undoubtedly advantages in being so tall. She knew she looked very nice indeed in the new half-crinolines that had come into style, the ones that were straight in front but ballooned out in back, a fashion that suited her curvaceous figure very well. And she could always be counted on to reach items on the highest shelves at the mercantile, a plus while shopping.
“Listen,” Maggie said to the Rawlings children. “When your cousin Jerry and I were young, we used to play a game called Maharajah, and it was a good deal of fun. One of you can be the Indian prince or princess. Someone else can be the intrepid English explorer whom the maharajah captures and ties to a stake to be burned alive in tribute to a pagan god. And the rest of you can be British soldiers who try to rescue him, or savages who dance around the burning pyre and try to shoot the soldiers with poisoned darts. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”
“I shall be the maharajah,” Lizzie announced.
“No,” John shouted. “I shall!”
“You,” Lizzie said, calmly, “can be the intrepid explorer.”
John promptly became as infuriated as Jeremy used to become when Maggie had insisted that he be the explorer. Feeling that she’d done her duty, Maggie turned and started back toward the group of women seated beneath the shade of the cherry tree, but not before their lilting voices arrested her mid-step.
“There’s nothing the least bit improper about lady portrait painters, Anne,” she heard Pegeen say in her distinctive, throaty voice, her soft Scottish accent slightly blurring her vowels. “There’ve been any number of them, you know, throughout history—”
Anne interrupted, indignantly, “And how many of them ever married, I’d like to know? Very few, I’ll wager. A woman can’t have a marriage as well as an occupation.”
“Perhaps not,” was Pegeen’s thoughtful reply. “Unless she marries very wisely, that is. To a man who understands … .” Then, in a more cheerful voice, she added, “But the nice thing is that, talented as she is, Maggie need never marry at all. I mean, unless she wants to. She could support herself quite nicely doing portraits of society children.”
Aware that they really were talking about her, Maggie felt her cheeks begin to burn once more. She knew she ought to announce herself, but the temptation to eavesdrop was just too great. Feigning a sudden interest in a stalk of irises, Maggie strained her ears to overhear what was being said.
“But that’s exactly what I’m most afraid of, Pegeen,” Anne exclaimed. “You know how unconventional Maggie can be. Supposing she falls in love with some starving French poet, and has to live in a nasty garret near Montmartre with a lot of other artistic types? None of them believe in the institution of marriage, you know. They think it bourgeois. Maggie will be a fallen woman. And what will people say about us then, I’d like to know?”
Pegeen inhaled to reply, but Lady Herbert said quickly, “Really, Anne, you’re being too hard on your sister. She isn’t a silly girl. I think it entirely unlikely that she’d do anything as stupid as fall in love with a Frenchman.”
Anne did not share her mother’s opinion. “She’ll do far stupider things than that, Mamma. On that you may count. You and Papa have let her run completely wild: Kindly don’t try denying it, I’ve seen it with my own eyes! You’ve spoiled her, Mamma. How else can you explain it? None of us, not Elizabeth nor I nor Fanny nor Claire are anywhere near as stubborn and headstrong as Maggie is.”
“Well,” Lady Herbert said thoughtfully. “None of you had quite the same influence Maggie had, either … .”
Lady Herbert’s voice trailed off, but Maggie wasn’t the only one who caught her meaning. Pegeen was quick to rush to her nephew’s defense. “Oh, you mean Jerry, I suppose,” she said airily. “Well, it’s true the two of them were thick as thieves at one time. But I do have to say that despite the fact Jerry was so much older, it always seemed to me that Maggie was the one running things. She was so much bigger than he was for so long. You know, I once caught her rubbing his face quite forcibly in some dirt. Jerry was perfectly helpless to stop her. He was twelve at the time, I believe, which would have made Maggie only about seven, but even so, she was taller than he was. I do think it was rather humiliating to him, at the time … .”
“I suppose we won’t be seeing His Grace anytime soon,” Anne ventured, in a deceptively casual voice. Maggie knew perfectly well how much her sister disliked the duke. “He’s still at Oxford, is he?”
“As a matter of fact,” Pegeen said calmly, “we received a wire from him just last night, saying he was coming home today. According to Lucy, who heard it from Cook, whose nephew has been acting as Jerry’s valet this term, there was some sort of secret assignation between Jerry and his uncle just this morning, which necessitated that Edward sneak down to the village to meet the carriage an hour ago, ostensibly so I would not learn the reason for Jerry’s sudden return. It shall be interesting to see how long the two of them think they can keep it a secret from me this time.”
Maggie didn’t hear the rest of the conversation. She didn’t stop to listen to it. The moment she heard Jeremy’s name, and the fact that he was on his way back to Rawlings, a slow smile spread across her face, and her feet, as if of their own accord, began moving briskly toward the front of the house. She was well aware that if Jeremy were coming home today, he would have to ride through the allée of oak trees that lined the drive. Which meant he’d have to pass under one of the oldest oaks on the estate, the one that leaned so closely to the drive—despite the best efforts of the gardeners, who for years had tried to prop up the trunk with metal supports—that its branches hung like a canopy only seven or eight feet from the paved road. Wouldn’t it be fun, she thought, to ambush him, the way they’d used to attack the traffic approaching the manor house when they were children? With any luck, she’d be able to knock him flat off his horse. No more than he deserved, for getting himself thrown out of yet
another school, if what Pegeen had said was correct.
Forgetting all of her sister’s exhortations to act like a lady, Maggie hiked up her skirts and began running across the front lawn of Rawlings Manor, perfectly heedless of the fact that her long, shapely calves were showing above the tops of her flat-heeled boots. It had been so long since she’d last seen Jeremy—years, in fact, since their school holidays had generally never coincided, or when they had, one or the other of them had nearly always been in the city or abroad—that she wasn’t even sure she’d recognize him. If one could believe his aunt and uncle’s proud reports, Jeremy had turned into everything a young gentleman ought to be: a skilled equestrian, superb fencer, excellent boxer, strong swimmer. She’d heard rumors from her elder sisters, who had occasionally run into him at society balls in London, that the Duke of Rawlings had matured into an extraordinarily good-looking man, a fact Maggie found hard to believe. Even more laughably, they insisted that he had actually grown tall, which she believed not at all. Jerry, taller than she? Impossible!
After she’d shimmied up the oak’s trunk, a feat Maggie performed easily, despite ripping one stocking, tearing her crinoline, and popping a pearl button from the front of her bodice, all of which she ignored, it was the work of a moment to settle herself in the leafy shelter of its branches. From this perch, some eight feet off the ground, Maggie had a fairly unimpeded view of the driveway, down which a lone horseman was cantering, even as she watched. But it couldn’t, she saw with disappointment, be Jeremy, since the rider was far too broad shouldered, and too tall in the saddle, besides It looked a good deal like Lord Edward, only Lord Edward’s horse was a bay, and the horse this man was riding was black as pitch … not unlike Jeremy’s mount, King.
Leaning forward until she lay fully stretched out along the sturdy branch, Maggie squinted past the green foliage and saw, to her utter astonishment, that the horse really was none other than King, the first horse Jeremy had ever owned, and his admitted favorite. But no one was allowed to ride King except Jeremy, and that meant …
But no! It couldn’t be. No one could change that much, not in only—Maggie looked down at her fingers, counting swiftly—five years. Lord, had it really been five years since she’d last seen the duke? Looking up again, Maggie saw that the horse and rider were very nearly beneath her now, and there was no mistaking it, it was Jeremy.
And her sisters hadn’t been lying, he was good-looking … if one liked those kind of Byronic, brooding types, which Maggie did not, preferring fair-complexioned men. His dark hair curled raffishly out from under an expensive-looking top hat, beneath the brim of which his piercing gray-eyed gaze stared derisively. His expression was one she recognized instantly. Jeremy was angry, his determined jaw set, his clefted chin held high above a frilled cravat, his long, gloved fingers curled easily round the reins of his mount, which he rode as naturally as if King were an extension of his own body. A body which, Maggie observed with interest, looked every bit as lean and as hard as those belonging to the men who worked at the local blacksmith, men whose naked chests Maggie had often observed surreptitiously while they hammered out shoes for her father’s horses … .
Lord, there went another one of those carnal thoughts!
But this was Jerry! She shook herself. What was she thinking? She couldn’t possibly be thinking of Jeremy that way! She had pounded that body down there with snowballs more times than she could count, and rubbed that face in the dirt just as often. And now he was riding directly beneath her, so close she could easily have knocked the hat from his head. In another second, he’d shoot right past her, and the surprise would be utterly ruined.
Without further hesitation, Maggie swept down an arm, intending to seize his hat and have a good laugh at his reaction. Unfortunately, at the same moment she leaned down, she lost her balance, and felt herself slipping from the branch. Frantically, she tried to cling to the limb, but to no avail. A second later, she was sailing through the air … .
Chapter 3
Jeremy’s first thought, when he heard the shriek and then felt the impact of a body against his, was that, somehow, Pierce had come back from the dead and was finally getting even with him for both the defloration of his sister and his own subsequent murder. Accordingly, Jeremy twisted about in the saddle and attempted to sling his adversary away. His progress in doing so, however, was hampered by the fact that his assailant had wrapped a pair of smooth, sun-kissed arms tightly about his neck, and was doing an excellent job of dragging them both down to the ground.
At what point Jeremy became aware that his attacker had both waist-length hair and quite sizable breasts, he was never afterward exactly certain, but it was probably at about the point both of their bodies hit the driveway and rolled a few feet into the grass in a tangle of crinoline, skirts, and coattails. The wind partially knocked out of him, it took Jeremy a moment before he became aware that he was lying on top of a body that, unless Pierce had sprouted a bosom in the afterlife, was quite obviously female. In fact, his face, before he lifted it, had been resting between two cantaloupe-sized breasts that seemed to have sprung loose from the bodice that had been confining them and, despite the fact that their owner was lying in a prone position, still reached quite perkily for the sun.
Although this was, to say the least, a pleasant sensation, Jeremy knew that if he had had the wind knocked out of him, the woman beneath him had probably been knocked unconscious by the force of their landing, and so he did the gentlemanly thing, and lifted his head to see whether or not he could render her some aid …
… and found himself staring straight into a pair of laughing, and strangely familiar, brown eyes.
“You great sow!” a lilting voice, oddly sweet for the taunts it was uttering, mocked him. “You bellowed like a stuck pig. I’ve never heard anything like it.”
For a moment, Jeremy truly did believe he was looking at a ghost. Only a supernatural being could so closely resemble someone he thought he knew, and yet not look like her at all. For the woman lying beneath him was undoubtedly Maggie Herbert—Maggie Herbert was the only female he knew who’d not hesitate to call him a great sow—and yet not Maggie Herbert, not the Maggie Herbert who’d spent the whole of her childhood tormenting him. That Maggie Herbert, the last time he’d seen her, had been gap-toothed and rail thin, with pigtails on either side of her head and legs so long and gangling that she’d hardly known what to do with them, causing her to resemble a newborn foal taking her first steps every time she walked.
But this Maggie Herbert had a body as lush and as full as any high-priced courtesan—and Jeremy had been with more than a few of them, and so knew whereof he spoke. There was no longer any hint of coltishness about her, and Jeremy would be the first to testify that the legs he lay so snugly between were anything but gangling. In fact, the thighs that had parted beneath the weight of his body were very much in keeping with every other part of her against which he was pressed—supple, strong, but ultimately very, very feminine. Maggie Herbert had blossomed, he realized, into what one might call a bosomy girl, but having been graced with slim wrists and ankles, and an infinitesimally small waist, she carried off the look better than a lot of other women Jeremy had known, not seeming the least self-conscious about her new womanly curves … but also seemingly unaware of the devastating effect those curves could have on a man.
It was only when he glanced at her face that Jeremy realized that this Maggie and the one he remembered were one and the same. Gone were the braids, it was true, replaced by a curtain of chestnut hair so deep brown as to look almost black against the new green grass, and as for her teeth, they were even and white now, without a gap to be seen. But there was a glint in those dark eyes that he recognized: a flash of something too good-natured to be malice, but too mischievous to be purely ingenuous. And there was a twist to those lips, which at one time he’d thought too wide by half, but which, upon more recent inspection, he found quite temptingly plump, that harkened back to the Maggie of old, the o
ne who’d teased and tortured him unmercifully and against whom, because she was a girl, he’d been told he could riot retaliate.
And now it appeared that merely by growing up, Maggie Herbert had won yet again, because he had never in his life seen a woman who struck him as quite so handsome … and yet remained quite so oblivious to his own charms.
“Oh!” Maggie exclaimed, laughing breathlessly. “The look on your face! It was priceless, simply priceless!”
Rising up onto his elbows, his face still only a few inches from her remarkable new bosom, Jeremy inquired, quite seriously, “Have you gone mad?”
When her only response was to laugh harder, he remarked, “You might have killed yourself, you know.”
“It would have been worth it,” Maggie replied with relish. She was laughing so hard that Jeremy, still sprawled on top of her, could feel her stomach muscles spasming beneath her corset stays. Maggie Herbert, in a corset! He never thought he’d live to see the day.
“Nevertheless,” he said severely. “You can’t go bashing about like that. You could have seriously injured yourself.”
“Oh, la. You never could take a joke. I see all that fancy schooling hasn’t changed that, anyway.” After brushing some tangles of dark hair off her heart-shaped face, Maggie struggled up to her own elbows, which caused the bodice of her dress to gap open even more dramatically, affording Jeremy a splendid view of what lay in the lace cups of her camisole. Unlike earlier in the day, he was perfectly incapable of looking away this time, and instead of climbing off her, as he undoubtedly should have, he lay exactly where he was and admired the twin curves of soft white flesh.
Portrait of My Heart Page 3
