Celeste Bradley - [The Liar's Club 05]
Page 31
He frowned at her. “I think I’d prefer to stay firmly on my feet.”
“I’m sure you would,” she said patiently, though it cost her dearly. Still, she could hardly rail at the fellow when it was Mother who had caused the entire mess. “Trust that I know what I’m talking about,” she urged him. “Livestock gets stuck in the mud at home all the time.”
“Livestock?” He looked a bit miffed at that, but began to lean back obediently. She caught his wide shoulders with her numb hands, kicking fiercely as his weight began to come on her. For a moment she thought he was going to sink like a stone, but then he began to float on the sluggish current.
“Now wiggle your feet side to side,” she instructed him. “You must break the suction of the mud.”
He scowled at nothing in particular.
“Are you wiggling?” she persisted.
“I’m wiggling,” he assured her gruffly.
Olivia was beginning to have trouble moving her limbs. She felt so heavy . . .
“I got one free,” he said exultantly, stretching out his arms for balance.
Olivia kicked too slowly and sank beneath his movement. It took all her strength to push back to the surface. She wasn’t chattering anymore. Her brain felt sluggish, but somewhere she managed to dredge up the knowledge that that was a bad sign.
He lurched in her grip. “I’m free!” He pulled her close with one great arm, carefully treading water so his feet would not touch down again. “Miss?”
Olivia closed her eyes. Her lids were far too heavy to hold open any longer. She hung there in his grasp, too cold and numb to save herself now that she’d saved him.
“Miss!”
Being one of the most eligible bachelors in London Society, Dane Calwell, Viscount Greenleigh, was actually rather accustomed to saving damsels. In fact, they seemed to drop from the sky to land at his feet in various states of distress.
The Season was nearly over, and Society’s mamas were becoming desperate indeed. Unbeknownst to them, Dane had every intention of marrying this year. After all, he was in his late thirties and his wild days were long done. A man with his responsibilities needed an appropriately demure, composed, well-bred hostess and mother for his heir. Therefore, he looked on all of this attempted entrapment with amused tolerance. Still, Dane had hope that he’d find a young woman with a bit more substance before the season ended.
So when a young lady fell into the Thames right before his eyes, Dane hadn’t hesitated before leaping from his horse to dive into the water next to the struggling miss.
Except that this particular miss hadn’t needed rescuing, at least not until she’d nearly frozen while rescuing him.
She lay in his arms now as he carried her up the grassy bank of the Thames. He didn’t think it was precisely proper for him to be holding her so close, but the unconscious girl’s mother—who only now had thought to run back down the bridge to the bank—was currently indulging in a rather overblown fit of panic and there didn’t seem to be any servants or footmen with them.
Dane wrapped his sodden coat more closely about the pale chilled form of his rescuer. Her frozen state concerned him greatly. He was feeling deadly cold himself, and he was far larger than the young woman he held.
He glanced up at the gathering crowd—where had all these people been while the two of them had been floundering in the Thames?—and picked out a mild-looking young man at random.
“You there,” he called. “Fetch a hackney coach here at once.” The fellow nodded quickly and ran for the street. Dane glanced at the woman he was beginning to think of as “the mother from hell” and tried to smile at her reassuringly. This only sent her into a fresh bout of sobbing and carrying on as she clung to his side. She seemed to feel that she was to blame for some reason.
There was no sense coming from that quarter, so Dane tuned the woman out.
A shabby hack pulled up on the grass. It was a pretty poor specimen and small to boot, but Dane was in no mood to care. He ordered the mild young man to load the mother into the vehicle and carried the girl on himself. Seating himself in the cramped interior, he settled her into his lap, keeping a protective hold on her.
Perhaps he ought to be ashamed of noticing that she was a healthy armful and that she fit rather nicely against him. Still, it was refreshing to be this close to such a sturdy female. She felt rather . . . unbreakable. He always felt somewhat uneasy when he came too close to some of the more petite women in Society. His common sense told him that he was not going to crush them during a waltz, but his imagination supplied many an awful vision anyway.
So when his coat briefly fell away from the young woman’s bodice during the jostling carriage ride, Dane fell prey to his manly instincts rather than his gentlemanly ones and didn’t precisely avert his eyes from what the thin, sodden muslin wasn’t covering very well.
Well, well. Very nice. Very nice indeed. He could safely change his description from “sturdy” to “buxom.”
Dane saw her open eyes and smiled at her, glad to see that she was alert once more. She likely hadn’t seen him peeking, and if she had, he certainly wasn’t going to affirm her suspicions by appearing guilty. Besides, the brief glance at her full bosom capped with rosy points that pressed tightly to the translucent muslin had been the highlight of his rather trying day.
Her gaze left his, however, and slid to where her mother sat opposite them, now sobbing somewhat less vociferously.
“Mother,” the girl said firmly through blue, chilled lips. “T–tell this nice gentleman that you’re s–sorry.”
The weeping woman uttered something unintelligible which seemed to satisfy the girl in Dane’s lap, for she then turned to look back up at him with an air of expectation. Dane hesitated, having the feeling that he was the only one who didn’t know what they were talking about. “Ah . . . apology accepted?” he said finally.
The girl seemed to relax. “You’re t–taking all of this very well, I must say,” she told him as her shivers continued. “That bodes well f–for your character. You must be a man of g–great parts.”
Perhaps it was the fact that he’d recently been peeking at her own rather “great parts”, or perhaps it was the fact that his own “parts” were becoming more and more stimulated by the motion of a curvaceous bottom being jostled against them, but the commonplace saying struck Dane in quite a different way than it was intended to. He laughed involuntarily, then covered it with a cough. Smiling with bemusement at the very unusual creature nestled on his lap, he nodded. “Thank you. I might say the same about you.”
The girl eyed him speculatively for a moment, then turned to her mother again. “Mama, you should allow this gentleman to introduce himself to you.”
“Mama” nodded vigorously, then visibly repressed her sobs and dabbed at her eyes with a tiny scrap of lace that truly didn’t look up to the task of drying all those tears.
“That’s not necessary, my dear,” the woman said, with a final sniffle. “The Earl of Greenleigh and I have already been introduced.”
Dane sat there for a long moment with a smile frozen on his face while he racked his memory to place the rumpled, red-eyed woman across from him. Finally, light dawned. Cheltenham. She was the wife of a destitute earl, but the family was of excellent lineage and spotless reputation. “Of course we have, Lady Cheltenham,” he said smoothly, as if he’d recognized her all along.
Then he looked down at the self-possessed and voluptuous young woman in his arms. So this was Cheltenham’s daughter . . .
Table of Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Halftitle
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
>
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Epilogue
Prologue