When she didn’t immediately respond, he went on. “My maids, however, sleep in the attic where there are dormitories. I’ve only been up there a few times, but there are just small windows, so I imagine it’s a little warm this time of year. And of course, you already know what my maids wear.” He looked down at her shapeless, worn clothing with disdain. He paused. “Feel free to take some time to think it over.” He glanced down the hall. The sound of footsteps was growing louder. “But not too much time.”
“I am not your mistress,” she repeated again.
“Fine.” He turned away.
“Mr. Thixton, welcome home,” a small, thin woman in a gray dress said as she approached them. She wore a belt from which a ring of keys hung—the jangling Sapphire had heard. “And what ’ave we ’ere?” she asked, taking one look at Sapphire and lifting her nose scornfully.
“This is Sapphire. I have inherited several homes in London and I…found this poor orphaned young woman on the street. I thought she had promise as a maid, though she has no such experience, so I brought her back with me. I apologize for not asking you beforehand. If you don’t have room for her on the kitchen or house staff…” He let his last words hang in air that seemed to crackle with tension.
“Cehtainly not, sih,” she said.
The housekeeper’s speech sounded strange to Sapphire’s ears. In each place where an r should have been pronounced, she used something akin to an h sound.
“This way, gihl,” she said sternly. “I’m cehtain the masta wishes to rest and not be bathehed by the likes of you.”
Sapphire glanced at Blake but he had already turned away, headed for the staircase. “I’ll be in my study, Mrs. Dedrick. Could you send up some coffee and perhaps a little something sweet, like some of Mrs. Porter’s cinnamon rolls?”
Sapphire’s mouth watered. She’d had nothing but half a cup of coffee this morning and her stomach was now protesting.
“Of course, Mr. Thixton. Baked fresh this mauhin’, just come out of the oven, I believe in anticipation of your retuhn.”
Blake rested his hand on the smooth, carved mahogany banister and started up the curved staircase. “Excellent.”
“Well whatayou stahing at?” Mrs. Dedrick asked Sapphire.
Sapphire shifted her gaze from Blake to the housekeeper, and for a moment she did not register that this was the way a housekeeper might speak to a new servant. At a loss for words, she stammered. “I…I…”
“Best you keep youh mouth shut,” Mrs. Dedrick interrupted. “I shall call you Molly. Shaffire is not a proper skivvies name. Follow me, Molly.” Mrs. Dedrick whipped her shoulders around and marched back down the corridor, leaving Sapphire with no choice but to follow.
As Sapphire passed the staircase, she looked to see Blake on the first landing. He was standing there watching her, grinning triumphantly.
Sapphire turned away, and hurried after the housekeeper. She’d rather sweep hearths and wash dishes than concede to his fancy.
Later that night, Sapphire lay on a narrow cot in the women’s dormitory in nothing but an old, thin cotton chemise that a kitchen girl named Myra had loaned her after taking pity on her. As Blake had predicted, it was stiflingly hot on the fourth floor, and although she had a long and physically exhausting day, she could not fall asleep. She was too upset to sleep, too angry with Blake, with herself. She should never have given in to her desire for him. She should have dived off the ship stark naked while they were still in London Harbor. Anything would have been better than seeing that smug smirk on his face when she followed Mrs. Dedrick to the kitchen to begin learning her “new position.”
Sapphire had expected Blake to come to her all day. She thought he might take the broom or the wet clothing from her hands and lead her upstairs to a lady’s bedchamber where she could take a cool bath and dress in a light, summer gown, then join him on the beautiful veranda that overlooked the bay. But he had not come, and as the hours ticked by, her hands became redder, her back starting to ache and she became more determined not to give in to him.
Tomorrow, she decided, she would tell him she was going back to London. He had promised he would send her home and she was going to call him on his word. She wanted to see Boston, to see the beautiful buildings more closely. She wanted to meet this architect whom she already admired, but the only way she would meet Mr. Bullfinch now would be if she were promoted from her kitchen job and permitted to answer the front door as one of the housemaids!
A lump caught in Sapphire’s throat but she refused to allow herself to cry. Instead, she rolled over on the lumpy mattress, said her prayers and closed her eyes, willing herself to sleep.
“Manford.” Blake rose from his chair in his study where he’d been reading and offered his hand to one of the few men he could genuinely call his friend.
“Blake.” The tall, slender man shook Blake’s hand and then wrapped his other arm around him. “Or should I say, Lord Wessex?”
Blake frowned and stepped back, always a little uncomfortable with Manford’s physical displays of affection. They had met at Harvard, where Manford had been an instructor at the time. His family was also in shipping, originally out of Baltimore, but after marrying a Boston socialite, Manford had remained in the city and eventually took over the family business, moving the center of operations to Boston after his father passed away.
“Can I interest you in a brandy?” Blake asked.
Manford laughed. “Have you ever known me to turn away a good brandy? Or a bad brandy, for that matter?” He loosened his cravat, pulled it off and tossed it onto the brocade chair that Blake had been sitting in before his arrival. “Sorry I couldn’t get here sooner, but Elizabeth had another dull benefit ball we were forced to attend.” He rolled his eyes. “I escorted Clarice, as well.” He waggled a finger. “You know, she had several invitations from perfectly respectable young men her own age, Harvard men, I might add, but she refused them.” He accepted the crystal glass Blake offered him. “She said she’d rather go alone than go with any of those boys. I think she’s rather smitten with you, my friend.”
Blake covered his discomfort by raising his glass. “Yes, an appropriate toast, to old friends,” he said.
“And getting older by the moment.” Manford brushed his fingers against the graying hair at his temples, then lifted his glass into the air and tipped it back to sample the brandy. “Let’s go out on the veranda, shall we? Hot as Hades in here.”
Blake added some more brandy to his own glass, taking his time before following Manford through the French doors that opened onto the veranda. The one good thing about his lengthy trip to London had been escaping from Miss Clarice Lawrence, Manford’s daughter. Though more than ten years his junior, she fancied herself in love with him, and despite Blake’s best attempts to extricate himself from her clutches, he found himself escorting her more and more often to social events. At first it had been simply a favor to Manford—a ball here, an art exhibition opening there—but by the time he had set sail for London, half of Boston had been gossiping about the expectation of an engagement between Clarice Lawrence and her father’s best friend and occasional business partner, Blake Thixton. Clarice was a beautiful, slender blonde with the face of Athena. She had the looks, the education, the social etiquette of the kind of woman Blake knew he should marry; the problem was that the moment she opened her mouth, all was ruined. She was immature, short-sighted, ill-tempered and…dull.
As he walked through the doors, it occurred to him with sudden surprise that Sapphire was probably no older than Clarice.
But that was irrelevant, he told himself firmly.
“So,” Blake said, walking to the marble railing to stand beside Manford, who was taking in the view of the bay. “Mr. Givens has given me all the news of what’s going on in the Boston shipping business, but I want to hear the real news.” In an unusual gesture of affection, he slapped Manford on the back. “So tell me everything, old boy.”
Manford laughed and sipped
his brandy. “Good to have you back, Blake.”
Blake exhaled, ignoring his thoughts of Sapphire lying upstairs, and gave his friend his full attention. “Good to be back.”
20
Sapphire quickly deduced that her work would entail anything not assigned or completed by another scullery or housemaid, which meant she had to perform the most difficult, dirtiest duties in the house. By midmorning of her second day in Boston, she had already washed, dried and put away a sink full of dirty dishes, swept the kitchen floor, scrubbed the front steps, polished six silver candelabras and the entrance-way doorknob and knocker, and carried table and kitchen scraps to the compost pile behind the garden shed. Now she’d been ordered by the laundress to collect the bed linens from the four bedchambers on the second floor, as well as the dirty towels from Mr. Thixton’s bathing room.
Sapphire’s first mistake was attempting to use the front staircase, and after a proper scolding from Mrs. Dedrick, whom she could still barely understand, she slowly made her way up the narrow rear servants’ stairs carrying a large basket given to her by the laundress. Her second mistake was allowing her mind to wander.
Towels from the bathing room? Blake had a room in his house devoted to bathing?
She had discovered that Blake was far wealthier than she had presumed and that he lived a life of luxury she had not even realized existed. Armand, who had plentiful servants and slaves, had been a wealthy man, but his success could not even begin to compare to Blake’s. In London, all of society had been impressed by his inheritance of the homes and titles belonging to her father, but no one had realized how the new Lord of Wessex lived in his own country.
His house, built on a cliff over the bay, was not, as he had warned her, entirely furnished, but the rooms that he had completed were magnificent. Blake mixed old with new, such as the Louis XIV pieces in the parlor, referred to as the downstairs keeping room, and plain, cherry pieces in a style she’d been told by one of the housemaids was called Shaker, in an office. But each room blended perfectly, from the fabrics on the chairs to the beautiful paintings on the walls, with themes dominating each. While the small dining room had a definite Asian feel, with Oriental carpeting and china on display, the larger dining room housed a table that was distinctly eighteenth century and French in design.
And Blake spared no expense—not just in the design and construction of the house, but in the decorating of it, as well. While Armand had two carpets on the floors at Orchid Manor, a fairly new fashion, Blake had at least two in every room, some of Chinese design, others Turkish, each one more beautiful than the next. He had authentic artwork in every room, some she recognized as works by Jean-Antoine Watteau and Anton Raphael, but some she suspected were American artists. And there were sculptures, as well, and glassware and pottery that must have come from halfway around the world.
As Sapphire climbed the narrow staircase with the cumbersome laundry basket in her arms, she could not help but wonder what was in this bathing chamber of Blake’s, and what had possessed him to build such a grand house.
But she didn’t even know whether she’d have the opportunity to ask him. Since they had parted the previous morning, Blake had made no attempt to contact her, and even if her so-called duties had not prevented her from seeking him out, she didn’t have the faintest idea where to look for him. She’d heard, by way of Myra’s boyfriend who worked in the stable, that Mr. Thixton had left early for his offices in the shipyards. If she was going to find him and give him a piece of her mind, she didn’t want anyone to notice her missing because she didn’t want to be the one to explain all this foolishness. He had created this farce; it would be up to him to explain it to his staff. For now she intended to complete her duties as best she could, despite the blisters on her feet from the crude, ill-fitting shoes and the calluses developing on her hands from the unaccustomed housework.
The first bedchamber Sapphire entered had obviously not been used recently, but she stripped the bed linens, anyway, as instructed. Just inside the second bedchamber door, she realized that this was the bedroom Blake used. Not only did it look like him—dark wainscoting, dark green brocade bed curtains and draperies—but it smelled like him, too.
Sapphire left the laundry basket in the hallway and walked to the bed, but instead of stripping off the linens, she leaned over a pillow and inhaled deeply. She felt her pulse flutter as she breathed in Blake’s scent, and images flashed through her mind. She remembered lying beside him in the tiny bed built into the wall of the ship’s cabin, the taste of him, the feel of his hand on her bare hip as she drifted off to sleep in his arms.
She cursed him under her breath and yanked the bedcovers off. “I don’t know who you think you are, Blake Thixton, but you are no match for me,” she muttered as she balled up one of the sheets and tossed it in the direction of the door. “Have me carry your slop bucket, wash your sheets, polish your silver, why I—”
The sound of Blake’s voice outside the bedchamber door startled Sapphire and she froze.
“Give me half an hour, Givens, and I’ll meet with you in the downstairs office,” he said.
Sapphire felt her heart leap in her chest. She wasn’t ready to see him yet; she didn’t have her speech prepared.
“I’m sorry,” he said, catching a glimpse of her as he walked in the door. He took a step back. “I can come back in a second.”
“No, please,” Sapphire said, tossing the pillow onto the bed. “By all means, come in, my lord. I’m almost done here.”
It wasn’t until she began to speak that he actually looked at her. Then he seemed as startled by her sudden appearance as she was by his. “Sapphire.”
She let her hands fall to her sides.
He glanced at the bed and the sheets strewn on the floor. “What are you doing here?”
She suddenly felt very vulnerable. She’d spent every day for more than two weeks with Blake and now she missed him. Not just the way he touched her or the way he made her feel, but the sound of his voice, his presence. Their conversations, their laughter. “What am I doing? What does it look like I’m doing, Mr. Thixton? Laundry, of course. A task befitting of my station, apparently.”
He reached behind him and closed the door. She watched it swing shut.
“All you have to do is say it, Sapphire,” he told her quietly, walking toward her. “All you have to do is admit that you sought me out for my money, for my title. That’s all you have to do. It’s very simple, really. You want something from me.” He touched his chest. “I want something from you. It’s a business agreement, pure and simple.”
Sapphire shook her head. “That’s not true. I sought you out because you are my father’s heir, because I knew no one else to plead my case to.”
He halted, looming over her. “There are courts for such pleas.”
“I know, but until I have tangible evidence, evidence beyond the letters my father wrote to my mother—”
His voice was cool and matter-of-fact. “None of which state they were married.”
“None of which state they were married,” she agreed reluctantly. “But—”
“Sapphire. This is absurd!” He grasped her arms. “Look at you!” Letting go of her, he jerked at the hem of her apron, stained earlier by the rotting vegetables in the slop bucket. “This isn’t you. You should be wearing the finest gown money can buy. That my money can by. You should be sitting on that balcony right now—” he pointed to the double glass doors on the far wall “—sipping lemonade and deciding how the ballroom should be tiled when the Italian arrives in the fall.” He clenched his hands into fists at his sides, his face reddening. “Just say it, damn it!”
She held firm. “I will not. You demand that I be false to what I know is true. Well, you’ve met a woman you can’t bend to your whims, Blake Thixton. I won’t do it. I’d rather die!”
He glanced away, scratched his chin, then looked back at her again. He was so close that she could smell his shaving tonic; she could see the tiny
wrinkles that creased each side of his mouth as he frowned.
“You are the most stubborn, most—”
Suddenly Blake was kissing her, pulling her roughly into his arms. She lifted her hands up to push against his chest, keeping her lips tightly pressed together. She had no intention of letting him do this to her, not again. But the scent of his skin, the feel of his arms around her was too much, too much for her to fight—and she knew that he knew it.
A sob escaped from her lips as she threw her arms around his neck, parting her lips and thrusting out her tongue to meet his. “I hate you,” she said as she pulled away, breathless. “I hate you!”
Everything happened so fast.
Blake snatched off her apron, nearly tearing it from around her neck. He pulled the blouse out from the waistband of her gray skirt, and finding the buttons down the back, lifted it over her head. Kissing him again and again, Sapphire removed his cravat and tossed it onto the floor. She unbuttoned his pressed shirt until she could slide her hand beneath the fabric and caress the bare, silk-and-steel muscles of his chest.
Blake groaned as her thumb found his nipple and she rubbed it, wanting to torture him, taunt him the way he taunted her.
Drawing his mouth across her cheek to her earlobe and down her neck, Blake tugged at the waistband of her skirt and she shimmied out of it. As he grasped her around the waist, they fell onto the bed, their arms and legs tangled, their mouths meeting in passionate kisses.
Blake fondled her breasts and then kissed his way to one hardened nipple, and even through the fabric of her shift, she could feel his hot, wet mouth.
“The door,” she gasped, writhing beneath him. “Blake.”
“I closed it. No one would dare open it in this house—not Lucifer himself,” he panted.
Her desire…no, it was more than that. Her need for him, was too great. She could no longer deny this strange, physical desire she had for him. Her logical thinking had vanished, gone on the warm breeze that played at the open drapes on the doors that led off to the veranda.
Sapphire Page 24
