Courting Chaos (Dunaway's Daughters Book 2)

by Lynne Barron

  Harry tugged off her gloves, which soon went the way of her hat, landing on a long settee. Scarlet skirts rustling and hips gently swaying, she twirled away and wandered over to the fireplace at the far end of the chamber. Tilting her head back, she looked up at the portrait hanging above the mantle. “The thought did occur to me, but I tossed away the notion when we became better acquainted.”

  His heart racing with possibilities too risky for a sane man to contemplate, Phin trailed after her, taking up a position near enough his legs grazed those rustling skirts, near enough he caught her scent. The lady smelled of cinnamon and sugar today. Still, the ever-elusive hint of lemon teased his senses.

  Was it the soap she used in her bath? Some sort of lotion or potion she lathered on her skin before dressing? A sack of potpourri tucked into her chest of drawers, there to canoodle with her corsets and shifts?

  Whatever it was, the scent drove him to distraction as he followed her gaze to look up at the painting. A young woman wearing a powdered wig and the wide panniers fashionable in the last century stared back at him.

  “The Duchess of Montclaire on her wedding day.” Harry’s voice was soft and gentle, almost apologetic. “She was not yet ten and eighteen, an heiress of sorts, a lady of good family and sterling reputation. She married the duke despite his being a notorious libertine. For the remainder of her life, she dutifully ignored the duke’s infidelities. Some say she even encouraged him to seek companionship elsewhere, though it meant foregoing an heir. I find I like you too well to have a hand in facilitating such a marriage for you.”

  “Harry, you do understand I must marry?” Phin pitched his voice equally low and reached out to touch her arm, trailing his fingers down to lightly caress the back of her hand. “I had hoped to put it off for some years, but even should this year’s harvest prove bountiful, it will only provide me a short reprieve.”

  “Now I’ve met your sisters, I believe I’ve a clearer vision of the big picture.”

  “Evelyn and Eloise are only a portion of the dismal portrait my grandfather painted before he passed away.”

  “You’ve a mother and various relations.” As if it were the most natural thing in the world, Harry twisted her hand beneath his and laced their fingers together. “Tenants and servants and all manner of people dependent upon you.”

  The feel of her hand in his unnerved and unsettled him in ways he couldn’t define. There was an intimacy to it he’d never known, never even realized he’d been missing with the various women whose beds he’d shared and bodies he’d enjoyed. A great well of emotion rose up in him. Tenderness and affection and desire that went beyond the need for sexual gratification.

  The last thing Phin wanted to do was spoil the moment by discussing his destitute estate, his hunt for a wealthy bride or the numerous people dependent upon him.

  It seemed Harry had other ideas. “How is it your estate came to be balanced upon the sharp edge of financial ruin?”

  “It’s a sordid tale,” Phin replied, stalling for time while he considered how much of the story he was prepared to share.

  “One you’d rather not have bandied about Town,” Harry said, giving his fingers a quick squeeze before releasing his hand.

  “I didn’t mean to imply you would spread it about.”

  Harry turned to face him, peering up at him from beneath her lashes and tapping a finger against her lips in what he realized was an indication of great concentration rather than an intentionally seductive ploy. All the same, Phin was seduced, beguiled and enraptured by the lush contours of her lips and the need to taste them.

  “Is it any more sordid than the fact my mother was three months along when she married?”

  “Along with child?” Phin asked, though what else could she possibly mean.

  “Specifically, three months along with me,” Harry replied with a hesitant smile, soft and lopsided and entirely lacking any sort of mockery. “A babe conceived before she’d ever met Jimmy O’Connell.”

  It wasn’t precisely sordid. Still, she’d offered up the information as if presenting him with a gift dug up from someplace she’d long ago buried it.

  Phin could do nothing less than reciprocate. “It was madness, sheer lunacy that led to the ruin of the family estate.”

  “Literally or figuratively?” No sooner did Harry toss out the question he hadn’t anticipated but should have expected than she turned to wander down the room.

  “A bit of both, I suppose.” Phin remained standing beneath the portrait, watching Harry’s slender silhouette weave in and out of the candlelight flickering from the sconces on the walls. One moment she was all but hidden in the shadows, her gown blending into the red walls until she became nearly invisible to the eye. The next she was illuminated like liquid fire in motion, light glinting on the silver-blonde hair coiled atop her head, caressing the pale skin of her nape and tracing her slim curves.

  Like the crystals of the chandelier, she seemed to reflect the light, to bounce it back until he was nearly blinded by her brilliance. And yet…

  A thought prodded Phin, as elusive and subtle as the lemon scent left in the lady’s wake. Miss Harry O’Connell didn’t so much reflect the light as…absorb it? No, that wasn’t it either.

  Before he could fully grasp the odd notion hovering just there beyond his conscious reach, Harry looked back over her shoulder and met his gaze. There was a question in her green eyes, perhaps something of a dare as well.

  “The second viscount, my grandfather, cast out his eldest son when he ignored the expectations of both his father and Society to marry his mistress,” Phin said. “Then the crazy old bedlamite hired dozens of solicitors in hopes of finding a way to break the entail.”

  Harry stopped to study another portrait. The duchess’s husband, if he were to guess by the cut of his coat, the big buckles on his high-heeled slippers and the hat atop his powdered wig—a cocked hat not unlike the one Harry had tossed to the chair.

  “And when breaking the entail proved impossible?” she prompted.

  “He allowed the lands to lay fallow and the manor house to fall into disrepair, spent his fortune and borrowed another to ensure his younger son, along with his hand-picked wife and their three children, lived a life of ease and opulence in London.”

  “Madness, indeed.” Reaching up, she trailed one finger over the duke’s chiseled features. “The ways and means men choose to punish themselves.”

  “The vengeful tyrant wasn’t punishing himself but rather his heir,” Phin argued, though he supposed there was some truth to her words. “He did it all to ensure his eldest son inherited nothing but a dilapidated house on a decimated estate and a monumental amount of debt.”

  “Except his eldest son wasn’t the beneficiary of the vengeful bequest.”

  Phin wasn’t surprised she’d worked it out so quickly. Harry had a knack for staying three paces ahead in any conversation.

  “My uncle, Jonathan Griffith, became a successful solicitor by trade and frustrated playwright by inclination. From all accounts, he was happy with his lot in life until the day he died in a carriage accident.”

  “And your father?” Harry moved on once more, in and out of the light thrown by three sconces and past two portraits before halting beneath the last one on the wall. “Was your father happy with the wife his father had chosen for him? Happy with the role he’d been assigned in the family drama?”

  Once again, it wasn’t the question he’d expected, but certainly the one a connoisseur of humanity’s frailties, foibles and follies would pose.

  “I don’t know as Father was precisely happy.” Phin walked along the wall, his gaze raking over the portraits she’d ignored. An elderly gentleman and his dog. Three women embroidering in a rose arbor. “I believe he was content.”

  “Such a piddling word, ‘content.’”

  “Happiness is a luxury one can rarely afford in my world.” Damn, but he sounded pompous and arrogant. Petulant even.

  Harry laughed,
and he could not quibble with the mocking tone woven through her laughter. “It seems to me Johnathan Griffith was lucky to escape your world.”

  “He hadn’t children, or sisters for that matter, to see well settled,” Phin replied. “He hadn’t an estate to set to rights. I doubt he knew the chaos his father had wrought or that he would have cared if he had known of it.”

  “Calculated chaos,” Harry murmured, once more lifting her hand to delicately trace what he suspected was the same face, though perhaps two decades older. “Were you aware of the sorry state of affairs?”

  “I hadn’t a clue, until my grandfather passed away.” Phin felt foolish admitting the truth aloud. “He suffered a heart seizure upon hearing he’d not only been denied his revenge, but that his pampered second son had been in the same carriage.”

  “And met the same fate?”

  Phin nodded. “Father lingered on for three days, just long enough for us to hope he might live to take his place as heir. When he passed on, Grandfather suffered a second, fatal seizure. I suppose his heart could not withstand the realization his estate and title would go to his grandson, an indolent wastrel who’d spent the better part of his adult life in pursuit of pleasure without a thought for the cost or consequences.”

  “Playing the role he’d been assigned in the family drama,” Harry murmured almost too low for Phin to catch her words. “Contentedly if not happily.”

  “I was quite happy to play my part.”

  “And now?” Turning to face him, Harry laid a hand on his arm, captured his gaze and held it. “Are you quite happy to play the part of the fortune hunter?”

  “I will admit it isn’t a role I’d ever imagined for myself.”

  “What sort of role did you imagine for yourself?”

  “I rather imagined my life going on as it always had.”

  “That explains it then.” Harry’s hand fell away, and her lips quirked. “You might consider pausing in your pursuit of an heiress long enough to imagine alternate means of gaining a fortune.”

  “I haven’t time enough to pause to imagine anything,” Phin replied in frustration. “I haven’t time to look to the big picture. I haven’t time to ponder the nuances or study the subtleties or whatever other nonsense you’ve got swimming around in that frighteningly fertile, marvelously mercenary mind of yours.”

  “What’s the rush?”

  “What’s the rush?” Phin repeated incredulously.

  “As I understand it, your partnership with the Marquess of Marchant has purchased you some much-needed time.”

  “How is it you know about my partnership with Marchant?” Phin asked, barking out a laugh as the truth dawned. “You put the idea in Marchant’s head, suggested he seek the necessary contracts with both the brewery and the railway company and partner with me to bring in the harvest.”

  “I made a pretty penny for brokering the bargain,” she replied without an ounce of shame. “You really ought to consider investing whatever funds you can scrounge up into the British Consolidated Mining Corporation.”

  “I haven’t any funds to scrounge up.”

  “You’ve no jewels to sell?”

  “Apart from Mother’s family heirlooms, all the jewels have been sold.”

  “Have you no un-entailed land?”

  “Roughly two hundred acres on the River Teme.” Phin saw where she was headed with her questions, but he’d been down that road only to discover it lead nowhere worth going. “It was once the home farm, but the cottage and the lands have fared no better than the rest of the estate. If I were of a mind to sell it, I haven’t the time or resources to make the improvements necessary to fetch a fair price.”

  “Hmm, there’s good grazing land along the Teme,” Harry replied, diabolically tapping her lower lip once more. “Perfect for sheep. Or other livestock. Oh good Lord, why have I not considered the possibility?”

  “What possibility?” Phin asked. “Wait, how is it you know about the land along the River Teme?”

  An odd flicker of emotion passed over Harry’s features, surprise or perhaps chagrin. The palest wash of pink crested her sculpted cheekbones. Shrugging one shoulder, she expelled a choppy little laugh. Really more of a giggle. “I was born and raised in Shropshire.”

  “I thought… That is, I heard you were born and raised in Bloomsbury.”

  “I suppose you also heard my father was a merchant and my parents passed away when I was no more than five or six?”

  “In a boating accident,” Phin replied, feeling ten kinds of foolish for having given credence to Arthur Maxwell’s words. Harry wasn’t the least high-strung, nor was her gait too fast for a lady.

  “You ought not to listen to half of what ill-mannered people have to say. I was born and raised in poverty on a tenant farm near Westernmill. Jimmy O’Connell ran sheep when he wasn’t running after anything in skirts. He died five years ago, fell into a ravine while drunk and drowned in three inches of water.”

  Phin had travelled through Westernmill en route to Knighton Hall. The village was nothing more than a rutted lane of shops and narrow houses with a church and a blacksmith at one end, a gristmill and a seedy little pub at the other, all of it surrounded by ramshackle cottages on plots of land worked by tenant farmers barely eking out an existence.

  “And your mother?”

  “My mother was a silly, spoiled woman consumed with regret for the choices she’d made and unwilling to live with the consequences,” she replied tartly. “She ran off when I was perhaps four or five. With a peddler, a vicar or a baron’s youngest son, depending upon how much whiskey Jimmy O’Connell had consumed on any given day.”

  Phin couldn’t begin to formulate a reply to Harry’s startling revelations. It seemed impossible that the elegant woman standing before him had ever lived such a meager life, endured the sort of poverty and deprivation he’d witnessed in Westernmill. The fact she’d somehow done so without a mother to guide and nurture and love her caused his heart to clench in anguish.

  “When I was twelve, we learned my mother had passed away in Paris,” Harry continued, entirely unaware of Phin’s agonized thoughts. “Within days, my grandparents came for me. I’d never seen so fine a carriage, much less ridden in one. As that carriage trundled down the dusty drive, and I watched Jimmy’s cottage grow smaller and smaller, I vowed I would never again live so small and mean a life. I vowed I would never give any man control of my destiny, my person, my heart, my hopes and dreams, or even my regrets to do with as he pleased.”

  It took Phin a moment to emerge from his maudlin imaginings, to comprehend Harry’s words and sort them into some semblance of order. When he had done so, he felt a queer sense of vertigo, as if the ground beneath him had shifted ever so slightly to the left. “Are you saying you don’t intend to marry?”

  “I was speaking more to the bigger picture,” she retorted with wry smile. “But no, I have no intention to marry.”

  “I don’t know as I’ve ever encountered a woman uninterested in marriage.”

  “Apart from those women uninterested in the marriages they’ve entered into,” Harry replied, a teasing lilt to her voice. “Surely you’ve encountered a number of such women in your lifetime, all of them in possession of female attributes—”

  “Better suited to a bovine,” Phin interjected with a chuckle. “I cannot believe I allowed you to lure me into licentiousness on a bustling street in broad daylight.”

  “I most certainly did not lure you,” she replied primly, even as her lips twitched. “Leastwise, I didn’t set out to lure you.”

  “Ah, so it was accidental, was it?” Ensnared by the amusement shining in her eyes, befuddled by her beauty and so relieved to be close to her after days spent watching her from afar, Phin stepped nearer. “You accidently lured me into licentiousness?”

  Harry tilted her head back. Her lips parted and slowly curled into a smile that was pure mischief. “I don’t know as I’d say it was accidental so much as incidental.”

/>   “Incidental?”

  “Secondary to my main objective. Then you said ‘Er…bovine…er…teats’ much as a boy would take a wild guess at Latin conjugation, and I simply could not resist.”

  “You could not resist teasing me?” Phin placed one hand on the wall behind Harry and leaned nearer.

  “A lady must take her pleasures where she finds them,” she replied. “Honestly, Phineas, one would think you’d never traded witticisms with a woman possessing the smallest measure of intelligence.”

  “You’ve more than the smallest measure of intelligence,” Phin countered. “In fact, I’m only mildly ashamed to say your intelligence frightens the living daylights out of me.”

  “For all my frightening intelligence, it was no easy feat leading you where I wanted you to go, my lord.” Harry punctuated the words with a soft pat to his chest. Her hand lingered over his furiously beating heart a moment, before she snatched it away and looked up at him with something that might have been confusion shining in her eyes.

  Phin could only imagine what she read in his features just then. Desire, certainly. But would she see beyond the lust, the want that was like a gnawing hunger eating him up inside? Would she recognize the affection and tenderness, the wonder and awe she inspired in him?

  “Phineas?” Just that, just his name spoken on a soft, tremulous breath, had Phin’s vision blurring around the edges.

  He brought his free hand up to her waist, his fingers curling around to her back, holding her gently in place. Before he could consider either the wisdom or the welcome of it, he lowered his head to kiss her.

  Phin’s lips were but an inch from hers when Harry let loose a little snort, quickly followed by a yelp, which may or may not have been a giggle.

  He lifted his head only so far as to meet her startled gaze. “Harry?”

  “Sorry.” Another little yelp tripped off her lips. “It’s just… You took me by surprise. I hadn’t realized… that is…you’re a bit ahead of schedule.”

  “You’ve a schedule for kissing?” Phin smiled at the notion.