She named a figure that quite frankly astounded.
“I suppose I should not be shocked,” Asher said slowly. “I’ve traded in the New World for a mere five years and found it quite lucrative. Your father probably had decades to build his fortune.”
“He did—he was somewhat older than Mama—and he also said the fur trade used to be a considerably easier business because the game was more abundant and the competition for trappers, pelts, and buyers much less.”
Rather than dwell on her stepfather’s nasty little epistle, Asher instead posed question after question to Hannah regarding her father’s business. She answered with both knowledge and enthusiasm for her topic, until they were in view of the large woods on the Thames’s side of the park.
At Hannah’s suggestion, they cantered the distance to the wood, and to the extent Asher could determine from surreptitious glances, Hannah remained comfortable in her saddle.
They’d wandered some distance among stately trees and startled a herd of red deer in a grassy clearing when a shout from behind had Asher drawing his horse up.
“That’s the groom,” Hannah said, bringing her mare to a halt. “He sounds exasperated.”
“Your lordship? Milord? Oi!”
“Over here!” Asher nudged his horse down the path, with Hannah falling in behind.
The groom stood beside his dappled cob, stroking a hand over the beast’s shoulder. “Come up lame, ’e ’as. Poor blighter must ’ave picked up a stone.”
Except examination of all four hooves showed no stone embedded in the frog of the horse’s soles or wedged against its shoes.
“You’ll have to walk him back,” Asher said. “Can you find the way?”
The groom squinted up through the trees, saying nothing. From his accent, he was a city man, and Richmond was more primeval than much of the shires themselves.
“We rode in with the sun to our right shoulders,” Hannah said. “If you keep the sun to your left shoulder, you should find your way back easily enough.”
City man he might be, though the groom’s smile suggested he understood her reasoning. “Right you be, miss. Come along, ’orse. We’ve a ways to walk.”
With a slight bow in Hannah’s direction, the man departed down the track they’d just traveled, the horse stumping along behind him.
Asher wanted to ask if their misadventure in Scotland had motivated her to gauge directions by the sun, but she turned a troubled expression on him. “Shouldn’t we accompany him back to the meeting point?”
“He’s a grown man, Hannah. Part of the purpose for bringing a groom along is precisely so there’s somebody in the party who can take a lame horse in hand—”
He fell silent. Her concern was not for the sturdy groom, but for the appearances.
The proprieties. They were alone, deep in an overgrown woods, not another human being within eyesight or earshot, and both of marriageable age.
Abruptly, the moment became interesting.
***
The longer they were in London, the less Hannah could read Asher’s—Lord Balfour’s—moods and expressions. Today he was in casual English riding attire, which meant tall field boots, breeches, waistcoat, and riding jacket all done in buff, brown, cream, and green. The ensemble complemented his robust complexion beautifully, and the way he sat a horse…
Some men rode well, and some men rode with such an intuitive feel for the horse as to raise the activity to an effortless dance. Horses responded to that sort of assurance.
Hannah had responded to it.
“Let’s water the horses,” Asher suggested. “If you want to go back, we can, and we’ll overtake the groom easily.”
“Provided he doesn’t get lost.”
He gave her an amused look. “You’re concerned for the groom, Hannah?” He lent the word a mocking emphasis, alluding subtly to bridegrooms, and somehow to himself as well.
When she didn’t answer, he swung off his horse and came around to assist her to dismount. This involved taking her boot from the stirrup, unhooking her knee from the horn, turning her seat perpendicular to the saddle, and… putting her hands on Asher’s broad, muscular shoulders.
“Down you go.” He did not lift her; he waited until she leaned forward enough to tip her derriere from the saddle. She intended to whisk herself to the ground with no more than an instant or two of proximity to him and his shoulders.
And his smile.
Except her plan backfired as she all but pitched against his chest when her hip protested anything remotely resembling whisking.
He caught her snugly against a frame as solid as the granite she’d seen in such abundance in the North. “Careful now. Think of all the fellows who’ll be disappointed if you have to sit out your waltzes tomorrow night.”
She couldn’t think, not of the fortune hunters, not of waltzing, because his scent was assaulting her reason and his voice was a growling burr right near her ear. He was warm and male, and they were alone in a way all the closed doors in London couldn’t emulate.
“Have I kissed you yet out-of-doors?” He addressed himself to the top of her head, where he’d rested his chin. “In the gazebo, but that’s not quite like kissing you in what passes for the wild in England. And while I cannot convince you to marry me, I can ask for a kiss from a pretty lady on a pretty day—for only a kiss.”
He wasn’t asking for anything. He was breathing in her scent, his chest expanding with each inhalation while Hannah felt a finger clad in soft, horsy-scented leather touch her chin and an exaltation of larks soar aloft under her breastbone.
“Just a kiss, Hannah. Just one more…” He sounded as if he were promising himself it would be the last “just one more,” but Asher MacGregor could interpret “one” to mean a single eternity of delicate invitation from his lips to hers, a possession that yielded as it seduced, and a voluptuous promise of pleasures yet unexplored.
Hannah’s senses conspired with him, bringing her the sensation—intimate, masculine—of the contour of his jaw beneath her gloved palm, and awareness, even more intimate and masculine, of his erection rising against her belly.
How long she indulged in Asher’s version of “one more kiss,” Hannah could not have said. Too long and not nearly long enough.
A horse snorted, and Hannah found herself set back, Asher’s hands on her shoulders for long enough that she didn’t stumble. He tucked a pair of reins into her grasp and turned his back to her, ostensibly to check the snugness of his horse’s girth.
“Good morning, all.” Connor MacGregor tipped his hat from the back of a stout gray as the beast ambled into the clearing. “Spathfoy and I saw your groom heading back on foot and decided to seek the shade of the woods.”
The Earl of Spathfoy tipped his hat as well, both the gesture and his expression more reserved than Connor’s smirk. Spathfoy was married to Genie’s younger sister, Hester, and to Hannah’s eye, he was the predictable result of a Scottish heiress marrying an English lord. Spathfoy had the English air of hauteur, along with the physique of a dark-haired, robust Viking. Hannah dealt with him warily, for all he seemed unabashedly smitten with his countess.
“You tired of hopping hedges and leaping ditches?” Asher asked, circling around to the front of his gelding and looping the reins over its head. “We were about to water the horses.”
“A fine idea.” Connor vaulted off his horse in a maneuver that involved neither stirrups nor much decorum. Spathfoy’s dismount was a more punctilious affair.
“The ladies suggested we might be more likely to find deer here in the wood,” Spathfoy observed. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen any fawns?”
He arched an eyebrow at Asher, and Hannah realized Spathfoy might have made a subtle pun. Fauns? A faun was a variation on the satyr, if she recalled her mythology. Subtle but not humorous, at least not to her.
Another rustling in the bushes from the opposite direction was followed by a cheerful, “Well, there you are!”
Malcolm eme
rged on horseback from the foliage, followed by two young women Hannah vaguely recognized, and at the back of the party, a groom on a pink-muzzled cob.
“Oh.” Malcolm’s smile faltered. “And Cousin Con, and Spathfoy. Are you lost?”
Asher took Hannah’s reins from her hand. “Connor MacGregor couldn’t get lost in the woods if it was darkest night and the middle of a dense fog. It’s Miss Pringle and Miss Hargreave, isn’t it? Ladies.”
Asher bowed at Malcolm’s companions. They simpered and tittered, and generally let it be known that finding an earl lurking in the underbrush relieved them of any pretensions toward sense. Of Spathfoy and Connor, they took the barest notice, and of Hannah, no notice beyond the civilities.
The interruptions—plural—were welcome because they gave Hannah a moment to regain her composure. By the time the men had watered eight horses, checked eight girths, and restored three ladies to their saddles, Hannah could pretend she hadn’t nearly been caught with her tongue in Asher MacGregor’s mouth and her breasts pressed to his chest.
“Fine day for a romp in the woods, isn’t it?” Connor asked as he held a branch back for Hannah and her mount to pass under.
Or perhaps she had been caught. “The day is lovely.”
Or it had been, for a few forbidden moments.
Connor’s horse fell in step beside Hannah’s mare, while ahead of them, Asher kept the ladies company. Malcolm rode at the front of the cavalcade, and Spathfoy, like a disapproving Viking nanny, brought up the rear.
“And you’re a lovely lady,” Connor said, “but we have lovely ladies aplenty in Scotland, and I will even admit that England boasts a few, seeing as my own darling wife hails from Albion.”
For him, this was flowery speech indeed. “Is there something you’d like to ask me, Connor?”
“Ask ye?” Dark brows rose, as if the very notion intrigued. “No, not ask. I do admit to some puzzlement, though.”
Hannah waited, for there was nothing idle about Connor’s puzzlement.
“I ask myself why, when Balfour has had the pick of the lovely ladies in the United States and Canada, and the lovely ladies in Aberdeenshire and Edinburgh, and the lovely ladies in London—of whom there are entire regiments—why does my brother the earl find it necessary to kiss only your wee self?”
Hannah blotted out the image Connor must be carrying in his mind, of her and the earl, plastered against each other, mouths fused, hands busily—“I have wondered that very thing myself.” It was the best she could do. Connor must have known that, because his smile was both sympathetic and curious, and all the way through the wood, across the fields and down the lanes, he didn’t ask her even one more question.
***
“We’re going to have to talk, Hannah Cooper.” Asher settled himself beside her on the log she’d chosen for her picnic perch. God help him, he even liked saying her name, though Hannah MacGregor had yet still more appeal.
Her smile was guilelessly friendly as she scooted over a few inches. “What shall we talk about?”
Malcolm had spent the last two hours recruiting half the single women of Polite Society to join their party. They might talk about that. Or not.
“We were nearly compromised today,” he said, unwilling to dither. “Had it been Malcolm and his lovelies who came upon us, we’d be arguing over a wedding date while the rest of the assemblage started choosing names for our firstborn.”
Hannah paused with a slice of apple partway to her mouth, then set the fruit back on her plate. “Over a kiss?”
“Over that kiss.”
A beat of quiet went by—not silence, because their group was now well over a dozen, all talking and laughing and enjoying lives that were not complicated by one pretty, stubborn, damnably kissable Yankee.
“Then you should not kiss me ever again, my lord.”
He snorted. “My lord, my blooming aspidistra more like. You should not have kissed me back.” For she had. He wasn’t mistaken about that, and would go to his grave not mistaken about that.
She picked up the bite of apple again and stared at it. “I should not have. That was badly done of me. I do apologize.”
He did not want her apologizing to him, not for kissing him, anyway. He plucked the slice of apple from her hand and bit off the end. “Apology rejected. I’ve made inquiries, you know.”
When she turned her head to regard him, he held the remaining bite of apple up to her lips. She took the food from his hand delicately, her gaze on him the entire time. The moment was distractingly erotic, though gratifying.
Across the patch of ground appropriated for their picnic, Spathfoy looked up from flirting with his countess and speared Asher with a glance that was the titled English equivalent of… sticking one’s tongue out across the schoolyard.
“Chew, Hannah. The food goes down more easily if you chew it up into little bits before you try to swallow it.”
She munched, and all the while, Asher felt her gathering arguments and female logic to bludgeon him with. A contest of wills with her was welcome, though, because a woman couldn’t ignore a man and fight him at the same time.
“I like your kisses too much, Balfour.”
A woman could, however, drive him mad while she resisted his overtures. “Your flattery will surely cleave all reason from my grasp, Miss Hannah.”
“You’re supposed to say my kisses would do that.”
Asher had said exactly that, as loudly as actions could proclaim any eternal verity.
Hannah picked up another fat red slice of apple and glowered at it. “This conversation has become quite personal. Shall we discuss the weather?”
“The breeze is blowing our words in the direction of the horses, which is fortunate, because our conversation is going to get more personal still. I wouldn’t mind a bite of that apple. Another bite.”
The glower became a glare, at him, which was much better. She bit off the end of the apple quarter and held the rest out to him. He took his bite from the same end, leaving her a portion at which to direct her ire.
“You want people to talk, Balfour? You want us compromised? Then why did you turn loose of me so precipitously? I would still be there in that wood, likely in want of all my clothing and my reason, had you not—”
He guided her hand, the one holding the bite of apple, to her mouth. “I would not have let that happen. I want us married, not publicly humiliated. Actually, I want us naked in a large, fluffy bed, all the pleasures still to prove, and my ring on your dainty finger.”
The image had popped into his mind as he spoke, a hallucination of happiness that grew more appealing the longer his imagination stared at it.
“You can have that,” she said, “all but the part about your ring, at least not permanently. I’ve been thinking, you see, and an engagement might suffice. A long, public engagement with all the trimmings, and we’ll even hire the church and then—”
The hell they would. “I need a countess, Hannah. You need a husband to supplant your stepfather’s authority. My logic is unassailable, and you know it.”
“I need to turn twenty-six without benefit of matrimony.”
When she bit into the remaining apple quarter, her teeth snapped the fruit in half, and she chewed the thing into bits in short order. Asher waited until she swallowed to make his next point, because he was a gentleman.
A somewhat randy, besotted gentleman.
“Say you reach the age of twenty-six, and your fortune passes into your hands, more or less, and you leave your stepfather’s house.”
“From your lips to the Almighty’s ears…” she murmured.
“Do you think he’ll allow you to visit your mother?”
Hannah’s hands stopped smoothing the fabric of her habit over her lap. “He can’t prevent me from seeing my own family.”
“He’s already prevented you from corresponding with her. Why is that, Hannah?”
“Because he’s a fiend.”
Progress.
“A
nd because he’s a fiend, do you think he won’t move legally to have himself appointed as your guardian? Your grandmother’s guardian? The woman has to be ancient, and you, my dear, are a mere girl.”
“I’m legally—”
“You’re legally female, and he has the requisite biological adornments to qualify as male, though one hesitates to refer to such a creature as a grown man. He’ll bribe your servants to spy on you, perhaps foist your aunt onto your charity as his spy, keep rumor circulating about your neglect of your grandmother, your eccentricity, your propensity for hysteria.”
Hannah set her plate aside, most of her meal untouched. “Why are you being so mean?”
“I am trying, without much success, to be as compassionate as I know how to be, Hannah. You need a husband who can make your stepfather look like the grasping, dishonorable, devious cipher he is and keep you safe from him, not only until your twenty-sixth birthday, but for all your days.”
Hannah looped her arms around her knees and hunched forward, assuming the self-protective posture of a child. “She won’t leave him. Mama, that is. When she was widowed, she was terrified, lost, unable to think what to do, for all we were quite comfortable financially. I was too young, and Grandmother was too old, but Grandmother managed anyway, until he slithered into our lives, offering condolences, taking care of this errand and that detail… And now she’s his wife, the mother of his sons, and she will not leave him while the boys are still at home.”
Maybe this was the real reason Hannah had to return to Boston. A single grandmother in reasonable health was a somewhat portable commodity, but a mother and several half brothers all under the unassailably legal authority of a stepfather…
“I’m sorry, Hannah.”
Her smile was a parody of the joy Asher often saw on her face. “You aren’t the one who should apologize. A system that means a woman gives up her legal existence as a separate person the day she marries is sorry—and another reason not to marry.”
She had a point, but he kept trying anyway. “Reform is coming, at least in Great Britain. Some women even claim ladies should have the vote.”
The MacGregor's Lady Page 18
