by Mary Balogh
“I did not do what I did in order to be thanked.” Daisy said. “She was being cheated. And she was being abused. If she had been a lady, every man on the street would have rushed to her defense long before I even noticed her.”
Lord Kincade took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “There is truth in what you say,” he said. “Doubtless Arthur will applaud your actions when he hears of them. Perhaps it is a good thing he is not of the Roman persuasion. He would be applying to Rome to have you canonized. But all that is beside the point, Daisy. The main point is that what you did was dangerous. Highly dangerous.”
“I think not,” Daisy said. “In my experience I have found that bullies invariably back down if one confronts them boldly.”
“There are exceptions to every rule,” Lord Kincade said. “What if the thugs who were working me over at the Golden Eagle had turned on you and decided to disarm you and punish you? You would very probably have been killed, Daisy. And gentlemen can behave in a very ungentlemanly way when being deprived of a night’s sport, if you will pardon my plain speaking. And street prostitutes very rarely work alone. Those who protect them and take most of their earnings and see to it that they do not retire from their profession until no man can be enticed any longer to pay for their services will not take kindly to an interfering, misguided, crusading lady cutting into their profits.” His voice had risen. He was glaring. He closed his mouth and held on to his control.
“Perhaps you would have been killed if I had not come to your aid,” Daisy said. Somehow her voice sounded less assured than usual. “Or at least you would have been badly hurt. Perhaps that girl tonight would have been beaten or used and underpaid if I had not gone to her aid. How can I watch people wantonly hurting others and walk on by as if I did not know that someone was suffering within reach of me?”
Lord Kincade sighed. “Daisy,” he said, “what am I to do with you? I pass by entirely all the arguments I meant to use on you about the spectacle you are making of yourself, the embarrassment you are causing others by your very publicly unorthodox behavior. Instead, you have turned the tables on me and given me a lesson in compassion. But you must not. You must not involve yourself any longer in potentially dangerous situations. Leave them to me, will you? Call on me when you see someone in need of help. Will you promise me?”
“How can I?” she said after a moment’s thought. “How can I ask you to do what I do not have the courage to do myself? Besides, you are not always with me.”
“This is not a question of courage,” he said, “but of strength. No one in his right mind would deny your courage, Daisy. You must promise me. I am your betrothed. I owe you my protection.”
“No, you are not,” she said. “Not really.”
Lord Kincade looked steadily into her eyes. “Yes, I am,” he said. “It may be a temporary betrothal that we have contracted, Daisy, but it is a real one. Until you tell me that it is at an end, I am your betrothed. And I do not want to have to start chaining you to my wrist in order that I will feel a warning tug when you are tearing off on one of your saving missions. Promise me now.”
“Well,” Daisy said, I will promise to call on your help whenever I can. Will that do?”
“I suppose it will have to,” he said, “though I have the feeling that you have promised nothing whatsoever.”
“You really need not concern yourself about me,” Daisy said kindly, as if she were consoling a child. “I am five-and-twenty and well able to look after myself. I have never come to harm yet.”
“Yes, but I am concerned about you,” Lord Kincade said with a frown. “One of these days you are going to go just too far. I just hope I am close enough to save you.”
“How kind you are,” Daisy said, her smile returning.
“Kind!” he said, exasperated. He lifted his hands and set them on her shoulders. He moved them until they were circling her neck loosely. “I might just give in to temptation one of these days, Daisy, and squeeze. I will thereby release myself and the world of the necessity of wondering what your next scrape is likely to be.”
Daisy smiled dazzlingly. “What a good thing it is, then,” she said, “that you have to put up with me for only another few weeks.”
“Yes, isn’t it?” he agreed fervently, and lowered his head and kissed her. And lifted it, looked her fiercely in the eye, muttered, “But you might be the death of me long before that, Daisy Morrison,” wrapped his arms around her, and kissed her again.
And, yes, he thought before conscious thought receded and totally irrational impulse took its place, the fates had dealt him a cruel hand when they had decided to house Daisy in such a delectable little package and when they had brought her running with her nightgown and her greased face and her umbrella into a certain stableyard on a certain fateful morning. Very cruel indeed.
But she felt very good, very right, arched into his body, warm and yielding, small and softly feminine. Her slim thighs felt good pressed against his. Her breasts were firm and fit comfortably into his hands, which fondled them through the thin silk of her gown. Her mouth was warm and inviting against his tongue. Her hands both soothed and excited as they feathered over his face and ears and lost themselves in his hair.
And here he was again, he realized, thought returning altogether too soon and far too late, making hot love to Daisy Morrison despite the fact that they were both still on their feet and fully clothed. A deal hotter than his imagined bedding of her had been at the theater a few hours before. And what was he to do about it now? he thought, uncupping her breasts and sliding his hands around to a more chaste position at her back and withdrawing his tongue into his own mouth, where it definitely belonged. What was he going to say to her when he had the courage to lift his mouth away from hers?
“They used to burn people for witchcraft,” he said. “It is not fair. Now I have to put my own soul in jeopardy by disposing of you myself.”
Daisy seemed to realize that her hands were still twined in his hair. She removed them and set them on his shoulders for lack of any other resting place, since he still held her against him. She swallowed awkwardly and noisily and said nothing. She merely turned an interesting shade of scarlet.
“What?” he said. “Have I found the key to the mystery? Can I silence you and paralyze you with a kiss? Perhaps I should do so far more often.”
“What nonsense!” Daisy said feebly. “I cannot think what you are about unless you mean to comfort me after the danger you supposed I was in.”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “That was a very paternal and comforting embrace, Daisy Morrison, was it not? I had better take my leave before Hetty comes storming in here demanding that I marry you without further delay. We would be leg-shackled for life. Would not that be a shocking and mutual nightmare?”
“Yes indeed,” Daisy said with spirit, pressing her hands against his shoulders and pushing herself away from his circling arms. “I could not endure being married and always having a man caution me and coddle me and force me into making promises that I have no wish to make or intention of keeping. And I could not endure having to be embraced whenever he took a notion to do it either. I like to belong to myself, and one does not quite belong to oneself when kissing. I don’t like it.”
“Good,” he said. “You made a tolerable effort to hide your disgust a few moments ago, though, I must say. And now we really must part, having at last found a topic on which we can agree. I shall say good night before we spoil this atmosphere of amity by quarreling again. Good night, Daisy.”
“Good night, my lord,” she said.
“Giles,” he said. “Call me Giles, since we are betrothed.”
“No, we are not,” she said.
“Yes, we are.”
“No, we are not, Giles,” she said firmly.
And Lord Kincade, not feeling it necessary to have the last word, smiled grimly, turned, and strode from the room.
***
“I am very thankful I declined the honor of being your sparri
ng partner this morning, Giles,” Lord Doncaster said cheerfully, lounging at his ease while he watched his friend change his shirt preparatory to leaving Jackson’s Boxing Saloon for White’s. “I am not sure I have as much blood to spare as poor Brown.”
“A nose bleeding always looks worse than it is,” Lord Kincade said.
“As I see it,” his friend said, “blood is blood, no matter what part of the body it is spurting from. One consolation for old Brown is that if he chooses to walk out at night for the next week, he will not have to hire a torchbearer to go ahead of him. He will carry his own beacon on his face.”
“Perhaps now he will learn to keep up his guard instead of lowering his fists so that he can mince around in that ridiculous dancing routine,” Lord Kincade said.
“My, my,” said Lord Doncaster, “you are in a foul mood this morning. Upset over the little Miss Morrison, are you, Giles?” He grinned. “I hope you did not rip up at her too severely after you had taken her home. She was rather magnificent, I thought.”
“Magnificent!” Lord Kincade threw him a look of disgust. “I just wished the earth could have opened at my feet and a friendly devil beckoned me with his pitchfork. I would have gladly jumped in.”
Lord Doncaster laughed. “She is priceless, Giles,” he said. “I envy you more than I can say. The main reason I have not considered marriage seriously yet is that I cannot contemplate the boredom. With Miss Morrison you will not know a dull moment.”
“Exactly what I am afraid of,” Lord Kincade said, pulling on his coat as if he had a quarrel with it and reaching vengefully for his hat.
“I thought”—Lord Doncaster laughed again as he followed his friend out onto the street—“I really thought she was set upon rescuing poor Fotheringham from the clutches of a whore. But I might have known better. It is just like your little Miss Morrison to champion the whore. Did she really ask Foth where his manners were to treat a lady so? Or did my ears deceive me over the distance?”
“If you don’t mind, Peter,” Lord Kincade said, “I would prefer to forget the episode—at least for as long as it takes us to walk to White’s. Since it was the talk of Jackson’s this morning, I suppose it is too much to hope that it will not also be the principal topic of conversation at White’s.”
“Just look at it this way,” Lord Doncaster said cheerfully. “If you are embarrassed, Giles, imagine how Foth must be feeling.”
“It doesn’t bear contemplation, does it?” Lord Kincade said, looking somewhat cheered. “Do you think I can expect a challenge, Peter? He might prove to be my savior at that—put a bullet between my eyes and save me from having to live through anything like this ever again. Drat the woman. I will surely strangle her one of these days.”
If only he had not kissed her, he thought. And then he thought with some relief, with enormous relief, that at least no one else knew about that except Daisy. It would be the Final humiliation. His fiancée had done something almost unspeakably vulgar and unladylike. He had taken her home to reprimand her. Very few would blame him if he had beaten her, even though she was not yet his wife—and never would be, thank the good Lord. And what had he done? He had kissed her!
***
It was that fact probably more than any other that accounted for his vicious mood that morning. And he had been rather unfair to Brown. They had been only in a sparring bout after all, not a serious fight. And the poor man might as well have shouted out, “Come and hit me,” for all the defense he had put up at that particular moment when Lord Kincade’s fist had collided with his nose. He might have waited until Brown had stopped his dancing and raised his fists again.
It was shameful and humiliating to admit to himself that he found Daisy Morrison almost irresistibly attractive. He undoubtedly wanted to take down her hair, unclothe her, lay her down, and make thorough love to her—in that order. He had forced himself to admit as much the night before after he had got himself unsatisfactorily drunk alone at home, hurled his empty glass into the fireplace, and spent all of ten minutes picking up every single shard of glass so that the servants would not know that he had had a fit of temper.
How could one find such a woman even physically appealing? She was like a nightmare come to life to dog his footsteps wherever he went. He had even found himself the night before in the fog of his inebriety considering entering the foreign service and taking himself off to India for the rest of his life, unless there turned out to be somewhere farther away where he might go, and for a longer period of time.
And then her wide and warm smile had intruded on the fog, and her slender, supple body and the smell of her hair and the remembered feeling of her breasts in his hands and a thousand and one other tantalizing little details, all of which had made him ache to hold her again and had rekindled his self-hatred and sent him to hunt in renewed despair for the empty brandy decanter.
And drat the woman, she had not even had the decency or the good sense to push him away after he had first put his lips to hers and smack his face hard enough to shake his brain ceils back into reasonable order. She had put herself against him with a shocking lack of modesty—but why would one expect such a ladylike attribute as modesty from Daisy Morrison anyway?— and allowed his hands to wander at will. And she had opened her mouth at the first tentative request of his tongue, and after he had accepted the invitation, she had done wonderfully erotic things to it that one would expect only a practiced courtesan to be experienced at.
Yes, Daisy Morrison had wanted him quite as much as he had wanted her. Say what she might about her age and her spinster status, she had wanted—and been quite willing to receive—a great deal more than she had got the night before. The wanton hussy. The baggage.
“Did you know that the Marquess of Chalcott is so far in debt that he is like to lose everything, including his liberty?” Lord Kincade asked his friend suddenly.
“Eh?” Lord Doncaster had been deep in contemplation of two young ladies walking along the street ahead of them. “Chalcott? Don’t even know him, Giles. Nobody does, as far as I know.”
“Powers’ father,” Lord Kincade said.
“Ah.” Lord Doncaster looked interested. “And so he is. So it would be of concern to you. Where did you hear such a thing? The man is such a recluse, one forgets he so much as exists."
“I have a servant on staff who has been a thief, a pickpocket, and doubtless a dozen other things that I would not care to know of," Lord Kincade said. “One of Arthur’s proteges. A thoroughly useful man, though I don’t believe my stables have suffered unduly from his absence in the past week.”
“Ah,” Lord Doncaster said. “And there is a point to this undoubtedly interesting but apparently useless piece of information, Giles?”
“At least one of the men who tried to make pulp out of me on the road to Bath is the marquess’s servant and runs errands from papa to son,” Lord Kincade said.
“You know, Giles,” his friend said, looking at him in some admiration, "you are a gifted storyteller. One would be twitching at the corners of the page if you were a book. As it is, all I want to do is grab you by the shirt points and shake firmly.”
“Powers’ need for a wealthy wife becomes more obvious, does it not?” Lord Kincade said. “And a good deal more desperate. And sinister.”
Lord Doncaster raised his eyebrows. “They did not want the earl your father back from Bath, then,” he said, “to make your sister less accessible for elopement or seduction? Powers is a nasty customer, by the sound of it—not just unprincipled, as we thought.”
“And perhaps not even Powers or not solely Powers,” Lord Kincade said. “The marquess apparently likes to go abroad in order to feed his obsession with card playing. He travels forth incognito, according to the inestimable Baker. The man has been given another day free of the stables to find out what our reclusive marquess looks like and possibly also what kind of female he favors.”
“What was the name of the man you played cards with?” Lord Doncaster asked.
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“Martin, or so he said,” the viscount replied. “And the female had hair as red as Brown’s face looked half an hour ago. ”
“Interesting,” Lord Doncaster said. “You have missed your vocation, my lad. You should be with the Bow Street Runners."
They ran into Arthur as they were on their way into White’s. He was on his way out.
“You are going in the wrong direction, Arthur,” Lord Doncaster said. “Come and have luncheon with us.”
“I will,” Arthur said, “since I do not know where else to look, and it is pointless to wander aimlessly all over London. I have been looking for Ambrose.”
“Julia?” Lord Kincade said sharply.
“Quite all right,” Arthur said with a smile. “She was just having false labor pains this morning and was feeling a little sorry for herself. I undertook to find Ambrose if I could.”
“She was having what?” Lord Kincade handed his hat and his cane to the doorman and frowned at his brother.
“False labor pains,” Arthur said. “Not the real ones. Daisy assured Julia that that was all they were, and sure enough, she had no more in the hour we were there.”
“Daisy assured Julia?” Lord Kincade asked faintly.
“Oh, is it all right with you, Giles?” his brother asked. “She said we were to call her that.”
“Has the world gone mad?” Lord Kincade asked of no one in particular. “Was the physician not summoned? I suppose Daisy would deliver the child too if the false labor led to a false birth?”
Arthur smiled again. “I sometimes think you are as nervous as poor Ambrose, Giles,” he said. “There is nothing at all to worry about. I am quite confident that Daisy knows what she is talking about. And she says that Julia need not expect to be brought to bed for several more days yet.”
Lord Kincade could think of no reply more eloquent than a snort.
Lord Doncaster coughed. “Er, might one be permitted to change the subject, considering our surroundings?” he asked. “What do you think of the estimable Miss Morrison’s exploits of last evening, Arthur, my boy?”
