by Lynn Kerstan
“Above all things, we must avoid scandal,” he said.
Taken aback, Jillian broke into a fit of coughing, which elicited a warning glare from the Earl. “Compose yourself,” he rebuked.
With a flounce of her head, Jillian deliberately quelled the provocative sensations that had threatened to undo her. The man is a solid block of ice, she reminded herself. An Alp. She must not allow herself to indulge impossible fancies, however alluring they might be. But scandal, ah, that was an idea worth considering. Suddenly, Lady Bixford looked very appealing. It wouldn’t take much to set her to doing what she did best, and the Earl would never stand for any disgrace attached to his name. Surely he’d send his disreputable weird packing if she . . . but she could not.
Not yet, anyway. For one thing, he’d managed to sidestep the confrontation she’d been waiting for almost a month, and it was only fair to have it out with him before setting the wolves to his throat. And for another . . . drat it . . . there was Lady Margaret. How could she repay Margaret’s kindness with a scandal-broth?
A long talk with Lady Bixford would force the Earl’s hand, and if he tried to keep her in London she’d do it, but it would have to be her last resort. No, the last resort would be telling the whole truth. Now that would be a scandal of monumental proportions.
“Will you behave?” he was asking as the curricle moved ahead once again. “I’ll sooner run the three of them down than loose your tongue at them if you can’t control yourself.”
Her hands curled, and if she had fingernails long enough, she’d have raked them down his face. The Earl of Coltrane had a way of taking any good intentions she might be trying to preserve and insulting her .right past them. “Well, you pays your money and you takes your chances,” she countered. “Run ‘em over, or pull up and see what happens.”
Chapter Nineteen
LADY BIXFORD planted herself directly in his path, and with a low moan the Earl dutifully swung his curricle onto a little patch of grass. As the horses set to munching happily, the three witches moved in to brew their poison. Tongue of old bat, he thought irreverently.
Jillian seemed to be reading his mind. “Straight from Macbeth, wouldn’t you say?” she whispered without moving her lips.
“My Lord, I have not seen you this age,” mewed Lady Bixford. She sidled to the curricle and lifted her hand in an unmistakable gesture.
The Earl waved a salute inches above her wrist with taut lips. “My dear lady, how enchanting to run across you again. May I present my ward, Miss Jillian Lamb? Jillian, this is Lady Constance Bixford, her daughter Marcellina, and her companion, Miss Eleanor Darndale.”
“Dawndale,” snipped the spider woman.
“My lamentable accent,” the Earl said smoothly. “All those years in France, you know.”
“Quite the hero, I understand,” Marcellina oozed. Her eyelashes flapped like laundry in a high wind.
“Not at all,” he protested. “Merely a conveyer of information.”
And that, Jillian suspected, was something these witches could identify with. “How do you do?” she said politely, but no one noticed. All attention was focused on the Earl.
“It came as something of a shock,” Lady Bixford was saying, “that you absented yourself from London just as your ward made her belated debut. One might have thought you’d be here to see her over the rough patches, so to speak.”
“But Miss Lamb required no assistance all, as well I knew,” he replied serenely. “Naturally, I’d hoped to enjoy her triumph, and only pressing business could have kept me away.”
“She was certainly a surprise to us all,” said the spider.
“I expect very little comes as a surprise to any of you,” the Earl observed with a lift of his eyebrow. “Miss Lamb has been part of the family for years and was a special favorite of my father, but until now she has elected to remain in Kent. I was delighted when she agreed to come up for the Season.”
For a man who didn’t like to tell lies, Jillian thought peevishly, he was awfully good at it.
“And why is that, my dear?” Lady Bixford crooned.
For a moment Jillian didn’t realize the woman was addressing her. She looked up from an intense study of her fingers to see three pairs of avid eyes probing for an explanation. To her left, one pair of slightly anxious ones implored her to keep her mouth shut. Oh, but it was tempting.
She resisted. “How could I impose myself on one who’d been so good to my family?” she simpered. “Uncle Richard—he insisted I call him that—importuned me time and again to come to London, but I knew he preferred his solitude. And of course he was concerned for his son, engaged with all that dangerous business in France. No time seemed exactly right.”
“Very considerate, I’m sure,” Lady Bixford allowed dubiously. “It must have been a trial for you, knowing that most young ladies make their debut at, shall we say, an earlier age.”
This woman could give lessons to a snake, Jillian thought acidly, aware of the Earl’s thigh against her own. It was tense with expectation. She knew he was waiting for her to lose her temper, although oddly she wasn’t even close. Lady Bixford and her companions were beyond silly, and she was beginning to enjoy the game because the Earl was so worried about how she’d play it.
She lowered her head demurely. “At times of war, we must all make sacrifices,” she said humbly. “It was the least I could do. You know that Uncle Richard and his son, now my Dear Guardian”—sniffling, she wiped one tearless eye—“were so enmeshed in intricate matters of state that I’d have been a burden when England needed them most. Indeed, I was resigned to my fate, determined to live a spinster until His Lordship insisted there was no longer need for such abjuration.” She lifted her head, looking somehow glorious, like a statue of the Angel of Victory.
Mark felt as if he were standing knee-deep in a cow pasture, not that he’d ever done so. Abjuration? What a load of manure, and no way to counter it. His respect for Jillian, generally repressed, soared to the skies. He also heard again the tiny voice that seemed to have taken residence in his head, reminding him not to underestimate her.
Stymied, Lady Bixford was loath to let go her prey without an ounce of flesh between her teeth to spit out at the evening’s parties. She dismissed the watery-eyed chit with a wave of her hand and focused her sights on the Earl. “It seems that everyone is here today,” she said slyly. “Only minutes ago, as we were strolling the Serpentine, I glimpsed a lovely swan.”
The Earl fairly bristled, and Jillian felt his anger like the onset of an electrical storm. Glancing over at the lake, she saw lots of ducks but not a swan among them.
“Did you now?” Mark uttered in a voice too lethargic for a conscious man.
“You can’t miss her,” Lady Bixford said cattily. “I trust we shall have your company at Lady Sefton’s tonight. Everyone who is anyone will be there.” Along with some that ought to be stepped on with a heavy boot, thought Jillian.
“Alas,” mourned the Earl, “we are invited elsewhere. A small gathering, and one I’d rather not join, but it is so difficult to refuse the Prince when he is importunate.”
“Just so,” agreed Lady Bixford as if she knew. “Until another time.”
With effort, the Earl held the horses in check until the women moved out of the way.
“Oh my,” Jillian sighed, “what a viper. When someone strangles that hag, I trust she’ll be stuffed and set out in a field to scare off the crows.”
“Mmmmph.”
“Never say you are displeased with me! I thought I handled the business rather well, all things considered. So did you, by the way.” She looked at him and saw his eyes sweeping side to side, as if he expected an ambush. “What swans was she talking about, anyway?”
“Must have been mistaken,” he mumbled.
“Hard to mistake a duck for a swan,�
�� she said skeptically, “but then Lady Bixford probably looks in the mirror and sees a human being. Oh, well. Are you quite finished with this meander through the swamp, or may we go somewhere and talk?”
Of the alternatives, none of them good, Mark decided he’d rather face Jillian if he were lucky enough to be given a choice. He was not. An upward glance confirmed one Swan straight ahead and no way to turn around. He could scarcely ignore the gleaming white phaeton and its exquisite driver. Mark wondered briefly if his curricle would float if he steered it into the Serpentine. His only hope was that the two vehicles could pass each other without incident. Angela knew better than to make a scene, and Jillian had proven herself capable of avoiding one. Perhaps nothing would happen. Jillian might not even notice.
Who was he trying to fool? Angela was impossible not to notice when she was on parade. On the other hand, his naive ward was unlikely to recognize a Cyprian. With a polite nod and a warning lift of his eyebrow, he would sweep past his mistress without further ado. Surely the Swan would find no threat in this pitiful dab of a sparrow, even though Jillian sparkled in a crisp primrose carriage dress and looked amazingly pretty for a girl with no looks to speak of. He only wished he’d had a chance to explain. Angela could not know how irrelevant the chit was to their own relationship. Devil take it! After cleverly disarming Lady Bixford, would they be pecked in public by a jealous, long-necked beauty whose livelihood depended, at least for the present, on his continued interest?
Determined to appear very uninterested in Jillian, he drew himself into his most lordly posture and moved over an inch, disturbingly sorry to relinquish the feel of her leg against his. Suddenly, the white phaeton was directly beside them, with Angela smiling sweetly from the high perch. Let me die, thought the Earl.
“Oh my,” said Jillian in an awestruck undertone. “How very lovely she is. Exactly what I always wanted to be. Do you know her, My Lord?”
“I do not,” he said between his teeth.
The Swan lifted a gloved hand in a graceful gesture. “Mark,” she said huskily. “How nice to see you.”
“Miss Carroll,” he gritted sullenly. “You look exceptionally charming today.”
Angela’s smile, like the Sibyl’s, was undecipherable. “I am promised elsewhere for the moment, but doubtless we shall have an opportunity to catch up in the days ahead.” Days sounded more like nights in her peculiarly bedroom voice. Nodding pleasantly to Jillian, she skillfully feathered her matched pair of whites past the Earl’s curricle.
Mark seemed frozen in place.
“We are holding up traffic,” Jillian warned, jabbing him in the ribs with her elbow. “What a beauty,” she continued thoughtfully as he swung back into the line of carriages. “Of course she must be your mistress, since you did not introduce us.”
The curricle veered sharply. “Good heavens, My Lord, do try to stay on the road. Everyone is watching us.”
He smiled at her with patent insincerity. “I do not have a mistress,” he said, white-lipped. “And if I do, you do not know about her. Devil take it, Angela knows better than to acknowledge me when I’m with a lady.”
“Bless her heart, what was she to do? Gallop past as if you didn’t exist?”
“Yes!” The Earl’s smile was plastered on his face. “She might have done so, but an enormous landau was in her way. I thought she carried it off very well.” Jillian grinned at him. “Do you realize that you just called me a lady?”
The corners of his mouth twitched slightly. “Under duress,” he pointed out. “And from now on, you are to forget her existence.”
Jillian sighed. “How can I forget the absolute personification of my dreams? I must say you have excellent taste, My Lord.”
He choked, nearly overrunning the tilbury ahead of him. “Be glad we are in a public place, Miss Lamb, or I would take you over my knee.”
“Here?” she gurgled cheerfully. “Lady Bixford would be in alt to see that.”
Glaring at her, his palm itching, Mark wondered briefly if it would be worth it.
“My Lord,” she said, serious again, “we have not talked, and I am ever so anxious to hear how things are at home.”
“I’ll take you back to Margaret’s,” he said gruffly. “We can talk there.”
A tense, unhappy silence swept over them like a fog.
Margaret, they discovered, was dining out with friends, which pleased the Earl not at all. He’d hoped to use her as a buffer between his own annoyance and Jillian’s crackling fury. Her wrath was as intense as it was inexplicable, for by rights he was the one entitled to a display of temper after the miserable day he’d endured. But nothing was ever accomplished by indulging emotions of any kind, so the more Jillian heated up, the cooler he became. Stoically, he arranged for tea in the upstairs parlor and lowered himself stiffly onto a chair.
The Lamb, clearly spoiling for a fight, paced restlessly until the maid withdrew. Then she turned on the Earl with flashing eyes. “How dare you keep me waiting all this time?” she stormed. “You said you’d be back in a week.”
“I regret if it insults your consequence, my dear,” he replied coolly, “but I have concerns that do not involve you. It was not my intention to be gone so long, but I fail to see that it made any difference. From all accounts, you’ve kept yourself busy.”
“I’ve danced to your tune, if that’s what you mean.”
“Sit down, Miss Lamb,” he said in the Voice. She looked surprised, as if she hadn’t realized she was on her feet. Mark examined the collation and selected a chocolate-covered biscuit. “If you imagine a display of temper will impress me,” he advised her, “pray remember our previous discussions.”
“I’d rather not,” she muttered, dropping to her chair. “You drive me beyond all patience, and I’ve precious little of that at the best of times.” She gazed at him curiously as he munched on the biscuit. “Why is it,” she wondered aloud, “that you are the only person . . . not counting Jaspers . . . I cannot get along with?”
He’d been wondering that himself. Although not of a disposition to attract friends unless he exerted himself, which he rarely did, he nevertheless made few enemies. Deliberately, he set himself to be conciliating. “For some reason,” he conceded, “we do not bring out the best in one another. And it must be especially frustrating for you, considering that I hold all the cards.”
“All the cards,” she warned, “have not been dealt.” When he politely offered her a plate of thin sandwiches, she waved it away, barely resisting an urge to see how he’d look wearing cucumber slices. “For heaven’s sake, can we get on with this? What happened at the Downs?”
The Earl shrugged. “I spent three days inspecting the property and going over the accounts. By the way, what has become of the household records? They were nowhere to be found.”
It was Jillian’s turn to shrug. “They were there when I left. So, what did you think?”
Settling back in the chair, he templed his hands and regarded her thoughtfully. “I think,” he said after a moment, “that you are a devoted, skillful manager, beloved of your staff, highly regarded by your neighbors, and altogether a weaver of magic.”
Eyes wide, Jillian stared at him in amazement. Enjoying her astonished reaction, he continued in a soft, expressionless voice. “You can well imagine I was not a popular guest, but while I had the distinct impression things were concealed from me, there was no mistaking your”—the ghost of a smile flickered across his face—“accomplishments.”
Jillian regarded him suspiciously, never certain when he was joking, not sure he ever was.
The impression vanished when his eyes grew stern. “Indeed, with the restoration of your allowance and funds to make up for the lack during the past year, there is no reason Choppingsworth Downs cannot be run along the lines you have established so well. At a profit, under the direction of a ba
iliff.”
“What?”
He ignored the interruption. “The income from the farm will supply your personal needs, and the estate will be held in trust for your children. I shall see that written into the marriage settlement. My congratulations, Miss Lamb. One way or another you continue to surprise me, and never more so than when I saw you last evening at Lady Lieven’s ball. More and more I am convinced there is nothing you cannot do if you set yourself to it, including the distinction of luring a good number of London’s eligible bachelors to the parson’s trap. Now all you’ve to do is make your choice.”
Once more Jillian was on her feet, practically eye to eye with the Earl. “I choose,” she informed him with stinging clarity, “to go home.”
Mark folded his arms across his chest. “Alas, that is not one of your options,” he said equably. “I confess, with all due humility, that I’d not expected you to enchant so many potential husbands, but surely one among them meets with your approval. Perhaps there is even a suitor willing to rusticate with you in Kent or send you there under your own devices.” He fixed her with a serious gaze. “If nothing else, my dear, you must want children.”
To his horror, a lone tear formed at the corner of her eye and streaked down her cheek. ‘‘I love children,” she said quietly. With obvious effort, she took hold of herself. “But there are many children on the estate, and I do not wish to marry.”
“Your only other choice,” he said implacably, “is to continue with me as your guardian. I cannot imagine you wishing to do so.”
Jillian looked positively murderous. “If I am all you say and have done all you admitted, why can you not trust me to make my own decisions?”
It was a good question, one that sent the Earl to his own feet. He stalked to the window, gazing blankly into the twilight. How could he respond when he was no longer sure himself what drove him? Some obscure, irrational instinct-told him this young woman should not be alone, shouldering burdens she’d already proven she could bear. She needed something else, but he didn’t know what it was. He’d thought a husband and children. He still thought that, but how to convince her? Perhaps she objected from pure obstinacy, heels dug in against his admittedly imperious will. No question that he’d handled her all wrong from the very beginning, but he was inept at personal matters and Jillian brought everything to the personal. She could not be manipulated like a political crisis nor debated with on logical grounds. He controlled her, barely, because he held the purse strings and legal right, but he was no longer so sure his view of things was best for her.
