Courting Chaos (Dunaway's Daughters Book 2)

by Lynne Barron

  “No, of course not. I only meant… Never mind. Please, do go on.”

  Phin lowered his head once more, slowly and carefully. Coasting his lips softly and gently over hers, he explored the lush swell of her lower lip, the bowed curve of the upper, lingered just there a moment for the sheer pleasure of it.

  Harry giggled.

  There was no mistaking the sound, no matter it was muffled by his lips.

  Miss Harry O’Connell was most definitely giggling, her breath billowing against his lips even as she coiled her arms over his shoulders. Fingers tangling in his hair, she rose onto her toes to meet his kiss.

  Harry’s lips were infinitely soft and welcoming as they parted slightly beneath his, the invitation both blatant and ever so subtle. Trailing his tongue along her bottom lip before dipping into the warmth of her mouth, he set out to seduce her with all the expertise he’d garnered over nearly two decades.

  Only it was Phin who was seduced, thoroughly and completely.

  All it took was a giggle-laced sigh, Harry’s breath mingling with his as she shyly met his tongue with her own, curling over and around and luring him deeper into the kiss.

  Harry tasted of lemons and laughter.

  It was Phin’s last coherent thought before he lost himself in a kiss that spoke of welcome and wonder, exploration and discovery. Angling his head, he fused their lips together and delved deeper, taking her mouth with slow, languid forays before returning to trace the contours of her luscious lips, to draw in her lemony sweet breath. Only to begin all over again, one kiss blurring into the next and the next.

  Harry followed his lead, matched the tempo he set, stroke for stroke, breath for breath and kiss for kiss, until Phin was oblivious to everything but the feel of her lips beneath his, the taste of her on his tongue and the sound of her whispered sighs weaving them together in a world where nothing else existed.

  Phin might have gone on kissing Harry all afternoon, might have laid her down on one of the settees and kissed her throughout the evening and long into the night, had the silence not been interrupted by the sound of footsteps on marble floors.

  Planting a final kiss to the corner of her lips, Phin lifted his head.

  Much to his delight, Harry was slower to react. Eyes closed, lashes fluttering against flushed cheeks, she drew in a shuddering breath, expelled it with a little hum Phin took for satisfaction.

  The footsteps in the hall passed the Red Gallery without stopping, fading away and leaving them alone in the aftermath of the single most astonishing kiss Phin had ever had the good fortune to experience.

  After a few more moments, Harry’s eyes flashed open, and an adorable frown creased her forehead. “Thirty-seven.”

  “Thirty-seven kisses?” Phin guessed with what was surely the stupidest grin a grown man had ever worn.

  Harry ran a hand over her hair as if checking for wayward strands, never mind he’d not gotten around to mussing the braids wound around her head. “Thirty-seven words to get you where I wanted you.”

  Phin sifted through the pleasurable haze clouding his mind, chuckling when he found the tail end of their earlier conversation. “You counted?”

  “I was aiming for another word entirely.”

  “A word more along the lines of udders than teats?”

  “Hence, I am not wearing a lovely new blue bonnet.”

  “You wagered against yourself with the bonnet in the window of Hathaway’s Emporium hanging in the balance?”

  “One is always assured a win when wagering against oneself.”

  “What was the minimum word count necessary to purchase the bonnet?”

  “Thirty-five.”

  “You missed it by two words?” Phin asked incredulously. “I’ll buy the damn bonnet for you.”

  Harry swatted his chest playfully. “Don’t be ridiculous, I’ll buy the bonnet just as soon as I’ve three pounds, eight shillings to spare.”

  “Haggled with Mrs. Hathaway, did you?”

  “You should have been there,” Harry replied with a bright smile that invited him to join in her amusement. “The look on Josie’s face when I talked her around to three and eight was priceless.”

  “I wish I’d been there to see it.”

  “I’ll take you around with me the next time.”

  The ease with which she spoke the words, the assumption there would be a next time, perhaps an unlimited supply of next times, did queer things to Phin, tied his guts in knots and stole the breath from his lungs.

  Emotions he could not name swept over him, nearly drowning him as he recognized possibilities lost before he’d even realized they might exist for him. Endless days in Harry’s company, sharing witty banter and soul-stirring kisses. Passion. Affection. Companionship. Shared laughter and tears, goals and hopes and dreams. Children and family and a partner with whom to grow old.

  Was it foolish to imagine he could have all that and more with this one woman, a woman he’d only just met seven days previously? Perhaps it was foolish, but greater men than he had built dreams on nothing more substantial than the feelings inspired by a woman’s smile. Hell, men had built entire lives and families with women whose smiles lit up their otherwise dreary, duty-filled worlds.

  Was that really what he intended to do?

  No, it was impossible.

  By the time he chose a bride, married and took possession of the funds required for Harry’s support, she would be settled in a tidy little house, protected and cossetted, her modiste and millinery accounts paid by some other gentleman, crime lord or bullyboy.

  But would that man see beyond her beauty, have a care for her beyond the use of her nubile body? Would he yearn to climb into her brain to determine its innermost workings? Would he appreciate her sly wit, mathematical mindset and light, airy laughter?

  And her heart. Just the thought of infiltrating her heart, taking up residence there, had his own heart beating triple time. An unaccountable yearning filled him, a longing to discover how it might feel to be loved by a woman to whom obvious things such as a handsome face, lofty title or sterling family line were irrelevant. Mere brush strokes sketching the barest outlines of the bigger picture. The portrait of the man he might become with her at his side.

  Could he bear to stand aside, to know some other man had claimed her heart and quite possibly her virtue, negligible though it may be, when he knew deep in his bones both were meant for him?

  Miss Harry O’Connell was meant for him. Was the simple—and admittedly all too complicated—truth justification enough for the sort of blatant debauchery he was contemplating? To court two women at once, one to make his wife and the other his mistress? It was duplicity of the worst sort.

  Chapter Fourteen

  In the days following the kiss she ought to have expected but somehow had not anticipated, Harry began to wonder if there wasn’t a great deal of merit to her entirely manufactured theory regarding the effect of relevance in relation to brain function.

  How else was she to explain the inexplicable sightings of Viscount Knighton nearly every time she ventured onto the streets? As she adhered to a schedule jam-packed with ventures onto streets from Wellclose to Wimbledon, Bloomsbury to Blackfriars, Cheapside to Chelsea and various points betwixt, the number of such sightings was both excessive and aggravating.

  The first such sighting transpired Thursday afternoon when Harry alighted from a hired hack in front of Madame Broussard’s shop just as Phineas exited the same establishment. His presence came as something of a surprise, until she noticed the pretty little red-haired lady clinging to his arm.

  Had he not listened to her words of wisdom before he’d quite stolen her wits with that blasted kiss?

  If Phineas saw her hovering on the street with an intentionally mocking smile twisting her lips, he gave no indication but simply turned to escort his companion to a luxurious carriage pulled up to the curb.

  Friday evening found his lordship seated in a theater box belonging to a matron in want of a
titled gentleman for her excessively well-endowed daughter. Perhaps it was her imagination, but she could have sworn Phineas flashed her a smile, there and gone before he returned his attention to the young lady whose name quite escaped Harry.

  Imagination or not, Harry lost her place in the conversation in which she’d been engaged—something to do with the odds Baron Watley might win eleven hands of vingt-et-un in a row. A simple mathematical equation whose answer went wandering right alongside her wits.

  Her reaction was beyond ludicrous, bordering on absurd. One would think she’d never been kissed by a handsome man skilled in the art seduction.

  Except Phineas’s kiss hadn’t felt like the prelude to seduction, but rather like an entity in and of itself. The sum of all its tender, ardent parts.

  For some unfathomable reason, the notion unsettled Harry and left her feeling vaguely off balance and out of sorts.

  As Harry habitually spent Saturdays in Runnymede tending Bathsheba’s grave, she was given a reprieve just long enough to talk some sense to herself and restore her good humor.

  It was just a kiss, after all. A kiss between friends and nothing more.

  When she followed Auntie Alabaster from the pretty little church in Bloomsbury Sunday morning, she could have sworn she saw Phineas standing beneath a gnarled old oak tree in the center of the green.

  On Monday, he and the heiress du jour, a buxom brunette, were a blur of movement in the corner of her eye when she hurried through Marylebone to meet Giancarlo for her fencing lesson.

  Harry spent Tuesday morning visiting the merchants and tradesmen up and down St. Sebastian Place and taking tea with the residents living above the shops. When she spotted his lordship standing on the corner just as Mrs. Garrison tucked three coins into her pocket, Harry recalled his supposition that she was running numbers and gave him a cheeky salute, just to bedevil the foolish man.

  Upon leaving Mr. Tremaine’s townhouse in Portman square that afternoon, later than normal on account of a tricky piece of music she was determined to master no matter her fingers refused to cooperate, Phineas was exiting a house just across the park. She couldn’t recall the family’s name, but they had two daughters of marriageable age, each with a dowry rumored to be well above that of the average Prussian princess.

  Phineas started toward a dilapidated carriage pulled up near the corner, his long legs purposefully carrying him across the distance. He’d nearly reached the conveyance with the faded and chipped family crest on the door when he suddenly stopped and slowly spun around as if pulled by unseen strings entirely against his will.

  Harry couldn’t help the smile curling along her lips when he found her on the other side of the park, surely unrecognizable from so great a distance, but recognized nonetheless. Gripping her cello case in one hand and lifting the other in greeting, she took a step in his direction only to halt when he immediately turned around and continued on his way.

  When she made her way down to the bookshop beneath her flat that evening, she half expected to see the exasperatingly elusive viscount standing behind the counter with Teddy.

  The shop was crowded with people eager to purchase the week’s featured tawdry novel printed on cheap pulp paper for the masses to enjoy for the bargain price of tuppence. None of those eager persons was London’s reigning rake.

  Still, Tuppence Tuesday was its customary success, not in monetary terms, but rather in momentum. Within a week or two, a good number of the books sold would have made their way to the hands of various servants in the wealthier households of London. Shortly thereafter, the ladies of those households would hear of it from their maids and rush out to purchase the more costly leather-bound volumes already rolling off the presses at Luther and Son Publishing.

  So it had been the last three years, since the night Teddy and Harry had shared a bottle of brandy and a kiss between them and come up with the idea.

  Only this time, if Harry was correct—and she generally was when it came to notions of a commercial nature—young ladies daring enough to do so would be wearing paste pearls dangling from pink ribbons tied around their necks.

  Some two hours later, Harry was embroiled in a rousing game of darts with Cedric at the Pickled Prince when she felt Phineas’s presence much as one feels a stray warm breeze on an otherwise cold day. Spinning around, she found him standing on the other side of the pub window.

  It was the most natural thing in the world to offer up a smile and a nod in the direction of the door in invitation to join the usual crowd packed into the pub for a pint and a bowl of Margaret Simms’s famed mutton stew.

  Perhaps he was only passing by on his way to meet Teddy Luther for another night of carousing, gaming and whoring. Still, there was something odd in the way he looked at her, something disquieting in his perusal that rendered Harry breathless and a bit jittery long after he refused the silent invitation with no more than a flick to the brim of his hat.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d been left smiling or waving at his retreating form in recent days. In fact, it was becoming something of a twice-daily habit. Even so, she found it disconcerting.

  But that mild discomfort was nothing compared to the frustration she experienced upon waking Wednesday morning panting from yet another dream starring the handsome viscount.

  This time, she’d not been hampered by uneven floorboards or too-tightly laced stays. No, she’d been quite naked, and his lordship had been kissing parts of her body she only very rarely remembered she possessed.

  The hollow of her right knee. The underside of her left breast. The arch of both feet, one after the other. The pale, blue-veined skin of her wrist, the tilt of her nose and the little dip at the base of her throat. Her fluttering eyelashes, the fine, wispy hairs at her nape and along her temples. The swirls of her ear, the bend of her elbow and the tiny scar high on her thigh.

  Not so much as a peck anywhere in the vicinity of her lips did the rake offer her, no matter how she sighed and moaned and begged.

  Harry laid the blame for the dream squarely where it belonged.

  What had she been thinking to allow Phineas to kiss her so soon in their acquaintance? She ought to have known the skewed scheduling would wreak havoc with her nerves and nocturnal ruminations.

  It was not to be born. Playing now you see me, now you don’t all day and sometimes long into the evening. Snatching only minimal sleep interspersed with dreams of a sensual nature. Waking up each and every morning with the covers twisted around her, her moans intruding upon the silence of her bedchamber and her body burning with unfulfilled desire.

  Sitting at her vanity, winding her braids around her head, Harry eyed the fickle feline reflected in the mirror. “Enough is enough.”

  Precious Pincushion did not pause in his morning toilet but continued washing his unmentionable parts amid the mangled knot of covers on her bed.

  Harry jabbed a dozen pins into the coils to hold them in place and rose to her feet. “I have pushed worse things than an unaccountable attraction to an entirely unworthy gentleman to the dimmest corners of my brain, not to mention the farthest reaches of my heart.”

  She hadn’t time to play peekaboo games with Viscount Knighton just now. Not when everything she’d worked for, strove toward and dreamed of was finally within her grasp.

  All of her sources—and she had a goodly number spread across the width and breadth of London—and all of the knowledge she’d accumulated in the past fourteen days pointed to the imminent ruin of the Earl of Dunaway.

  Leastwise, the laying waste to all his lordship held dear.

  Specifically, what little remained of the fortune he’d married to gain and not yet disposed of during three decades of decadence and debauchery.

  Mr. King had flown the coop, taking Dunaway’s hopes for an advantageous match for Annalise along with him on a jaunt to Middleborough, Manchester or perhaps Madagascar. The earl had been left behind with nothing but a mountain of mortgages, markers and misappropriated promises to shore
up his future expectations.

  It was time to whip those future expectations out from under him, to finally see him toppled from his gilded, debt-riddled throne. It needed only a well-timed push, a few words whispered in the right ears, a pointed suggestion here, a seemingly innocuous query there. A bit of subtlety, a smidgeon of finesse, an elusive wisp of gossip carried on a breeze and bandied about Town until gossip became scandal and scandal became ruination.

  Harry would have liked to discuss the scheme with Withy before she put it into play. After all, it wasn’t one of the many strategies they’d debated, tallying the cost and rewards and deciding how best to balance the losses and compound the gains. But no one had seen the fat old lecher in some time. Even his neighbor, brother and rival in all things, the Duke of Cheltenham, was unaware of his whereabouts. And that was saying quite a bit, seeing as His Grace strictly followed the maxim hold your friends close and your enemies closer.

  Until Withy reappeared, she was on her own.

  A state of being which was both achingly familiar and frighteningly foreign to Harry, yet in no way hinted that her world as she knew it was teetering in preparation to spinning off its axis. Had she not been distracted night and day by a rogue too handsome for his own good, she might have felt the shift in the atmosphere, might have foreseen the catastrophe looming on the horizon and taken measures to mitigate the damages.

  As it was, Harry arrived at the Montclaire Museum a bit frazzled but otherwise entirely unaware of the extraordinary turn of events about to unfold within its walls. Late by a good twenty minutes, all of them and an additional one hundred and eighty owing to a number of stops made along the way to whisper pointed suggestions and ask seemingly innocuous questions, she hurried up the steps.

  Wind whipped her emerald skirts around her legs and nearly plucked her new bonnet from her head before she slammed a hand down on the crown to hold it in place. Three pounds, eight shillings she’d handed to a smirking Josie Hathaway before the milliner had even opened her door to the public. Harry had only just barely survived another visit to Mr. King’s office with her bonnet still perched at a jaunty angle atop her braids. She’d be damned before she lost it to anything as trifling as a spring breeze.