The Ruin Of A Rogue (20 page)

“If you don’t mind, I’ll move these blankets from the settle. Anne and Johnny can sit down out of your way. I’ll find something to entertain them.”

The harassed mother accepted gratefully and commenced the tricky business of starting a fire with very little dry kindling. The men went outside, and indoor activities became punctuated by sounds of banging on the roof. Anne wrapped each of the small children in a dry blanket from the Hinton attic. They sat on either side of her, fixing her with huge, expectant eyes.

She had no idea how to entertain children.

She cleared her throat. “How old are you?”

“Five.”

“Seven.”

What now? She needed a question that couldn’t be answered in monosyllables. Should she inquire about their schooling, or would it shame their mother if they had none?

“Do you like cats?” young Anne asked, apparently possessed of better social instincts than the heiress of Camber.

“I do. My cousin Caro has a cat named Tish. He’s yellow.”

“Ours is called Blackie.”

“He’s black,” added Johnny.

“In that case, he has a very good name. I should be honored to make his acquaintance.”

The little girl giggled. “He’s gone hunting.”

So much for that promising line of conversation.

“Why are you wearing breeches?” the boy asked. “Aren’t you a lady?”

The front of her coat had fallen open, revealing her knees. Too late now. “My gown was wet.”

“Were you out in the storm?”

“Not just out. I was trapped in a big hole in the ground until Lord Lithgow found me.”

The children nodded, unsurprised that His Superb Lordship had come to the rescue. “He’s the bravest man in the world except my dad,” Johnny said.

“Are you the lady who’s been digging?” the girl asked. “Dad says Mr. Hooke used to do it a long time ago. It’s a house from the olden days.”

“A villa, built by the Romans nearly two thousand years ago. A Roman house is called a villa.”

“Tell us a story about these Romans,” Johnny begged.

“Well, I don’t know anything about the specific people who lived here. We can only find clues about how they lived by finding things that were buried when they left.”

“Treasures? Are they made of gold?” His eyes gleamed.

“I haven’t found anything like that. Mostly broken bits of pots and metal.” And the occasional belt buckle.

Little Anne was unimpressed. “It sounds dull.”

Wracking her brain for a tale with a bit more dramatic potential, Anne came up with the tale of Horatius, who saved Rome from the advancing Etruscans by holding the bridge over the Tiber while the outnumbered Roman army escaped. It was a big success. Apart from dodging impossible questions about weaponry from Johnny, she managed to hold them enthralled. “And then,” she concluded, “once they’d torn down the bridge so the Etruscans couldn’t cross, Horatius jumped in the river and swam home.”

“Why couldn’t the ’Truscans jump in the river and swim across too?” Her namesake might not be pretty but she was sharp.

“That’s a very good question, Anne. It was because their armor was too heavy.”

“Didn’t Horatius have armor too?”

She’d wondered the same thing herself. An explanation of how historical accounts differed as to whether Horatius survived the river would, she felt, spoil the story.

Little Johnny had the answer. “Horatius was stronger than all the ’Truscans,” he said scornfully. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to fight so many. ’Course he could swim wearing armor.”

Apparently it took the male mind to appreciate a good war story.

A huge crash outside and a shouted oath made her leap up, heart in her mouth. Marcus! He wasn’t used to this kind of work. Supposing he’d fallen off the slippery roof and broken a bone? Or worse? She reached the door just ahead of Mrs. Burt and both women burst out, regardless of the chill.

Anne thrust aside the other woman and fell to her knees beside Marcus, who lay flat on his back with his eyes closed, horribly still. “Oh God.” Her eyes blurred and her hand shook as she stroked his forehead. “Marcus, wake up!”

He opened his eyes, and something inside her that had sunk to the pit of her stomach rushed upward to her heart.

“Are you injured? Where?”

“Only my pride. What a damn fool thing to do, falling off the ladder. Knocked poor Joe down too. I’ve had a nice little rest and now I must get back to work.”

The elder Burt boy was also on the ground, being fussed over by his mother. Mr. Burt peered anxiously from his perch on the roof. “Are you all right, my lord? My fault. My foot slipped and knocked the top of the ladder.”

Marcus clambered gingerly to his feet. “No harm done, except a slight pain in a place I’d better not mention. How are you, Joe?”

The boy was fine too. The alarm over, the women went back inside, delivering dire injunctions to the roofing party to be more careful. “I don’t like this, miss,” Mrs. Burt said. “I was that worried that Burt or Joe was hurt. And His Lordship too.”

Anne felt a little guilty that she hadn’t given much thought to the possible injury of Burt or his son. What would happen to this family if the father was killed, or even seriously injured? How would they survive? Seeing Marcus stretched out was the most terrifying sight in all her experience. Supposing he’d died?

Johnny tugged at her sleeve. “Tell us more about the Romans, miss.”

A couple of stories later Anne had little voice left and fewer ideas. The men returned and pronounced the roof airtight. Hungry eyes surveyed the food basket. It was time to leave the Burts to their own devices.

She clutched Marcus’s arm as they stumbled home in the fading twilight, relishing his warm
living
body.

“I feel small in the face of such hardship,” she said.

“Don’t. Mrs. Burt was grateful to you for distracting the children. You have a talent for it.”

She’d enjoyed the youngsters, she realized. They were much easier to amuse than adults. When she thought of motherhood at all, it was in terms of duty, the provision of another heir, preferably male, for her heritage. Marcus would be a good father. The direction of her thoughts scared and thrilled her.

“At least you were doing something practical,” she said.

“It’s my responsibility. I don’t imagine any of your tenants live like that.”

“The Camber lands have always been well managed. You inherited a neglected estate and you’re doing your best. And you did not order the weather.”

She sensed his muscles stiffen and the chasm widen between them. He must surely resent her abundant fortune when he had so little, especially now she knew how poor his options were.

“You know,” she said, tightening her grip on his arm lest he slip away. “I have no control over my estates. Nothing can be done without the consent of Morrissey and the other trustees. Did you know that I cannot wed without their permission?”

“You are almost of age.”

“In February, but it doesn’t matter. If I marry with Morrissey’s approval my husband will take over. If not, the trustees remain in charge.”

“I’m not surprised. Heiresses to great fortunes are usually well protected.”

It was too dark to see his face, not that his expression would tell her anything. From his curt tone of voice she guessed he’d favor her with that bland look that disguised every thought and emotion. She opened her mouth to ask this rogue, this fortune hunter, what he meant by pursuing her if he knew it might get him nothing. He might tell her he didn’t care for her fortune, that he wanted her without it. If he said that she would surely die of joy because she was in love with him. She loved Marcus Lithgow.

She didn’t ask the question because she knew he’d tell her the truth and if it wasn’t the right answer she couldn’t bear it. She preferred to revel in a state of hopeful ignorance, at least for a while.

Chapter 20

A
nother evening of tea in the drawing room. It would have been wiser for him to send Anne to bed after dinner and to go for a long walk or take a cold bath. His resistance was low.

They took their places in front of the fire in a silence fraught with unspoken thoughts and repressed desires. She hooked one calf over her knee in a masculine pose that displayed the long limbs and slender thighs and drew attention to the buttoned fall of the breeches. The area looked wrong on a woman, without male equipment to disturb the line. The line of his own breeches was becoming more disturbed by the second.

She regarded him with a less guarded expression than he’d ever seen her wear, as though something had shifted in her view of him. He still couldn’t read her face with any certainty, but he both yearned to know and dreaded what her new softness might mean.

“Do you play chess?” she asked. Perhaps she also sought a distraction.

“Are you already tired of destroying me at cards?”

“There’s no luck in chess. We’d be equals.”

Her care for his self-esteem touched him. “It’s not my best game. I’ve never studied it because there’s little money in it. But the principle of seeing several moves in advance is similar to a number of card games.”

She went over to the tallboy between the windows. “You’ll probably beat me then. There’s a set in the bottom drawer.” Her kneeling to retrieve it gave him a splendid view of her bottom beneath its soft leather covering. He doubted he was going to be much good at looking ahead tonight. On the chessboard, that was. He gritted his teeth and lined up the pieces. Damn it, why did she insist on helping? Her hands brushed against his and contact wasn’t a good idea.

Happily, his competitive instincts kicked in. Even severe unresolved lust wasn’t enough to spoil his ingrained habit of playing to win. Or so he thought, until she played him into a corner and forced him to resign in a couple of dozen moves.

“Has your brain gone the way of your luck?” she asked sweetly. “That was too easy.”

That was a terrible thought. “Line them up.”

He kept his eyes off his opponent and his mind on the board, the only sounds the clock ticking and the hissing coals punctuated by the thud of chessmen moved from square to square.

“Check.”

He brought in a bishop to foil the attack. “Check,” he said a few moves later, forcing her to sacrifice a rook. A hard-fought game eventually ended in a draw.

“You held back on me, Anne. You’re an excellent player. At least as good as I.” She looked happily smug. “Your grandfather made a better job of teaching you the game than he did piquet.”

“Grandfather didn’t play. Felix taught me. He studied the game.”

The image of her intended husband as a callow idiot wavered. “I never got the impression he was an intellectual sort.”

“Felix was very clever. He was brilliant at Cambridge and always said he’d like to have been a scholar or a barrister if he hadn’t been heir to the earldom.”

Marcus didn’t like it. He didn’t like it one bit. “But he never kissed you.”

“No, such a shame. I think you should kiss me now to make up for it.”

“Are you managing me, Anne Brotherton?”

Her eyes widened with utterly false innocence. “Don’t you want to kiss me?”

“Want has nothing to do with it,” he ground out.

“Please, Marcus.”

He was only so strong. Reaching across the table, sending chessmen flying, he snatched her onto his lap and seized her lips. There was neither finesse nor restraint on either side, merely a crazed mutual union of tongues and teeth and saliva. She gave as good as she got, and any doubts he’d harbored that Anne Brotherton was a passionate woman were dispelled forever. Digging her fingers into his skull she demanded ever more, emitting little groans of pleasure that had his cock swelling to the point of pain. His head buzzed and he knew he was losing control. This couldn’t go on, so, once again, he put her aside, inelegantly pushing her to her feet.

“Why?” She was panting.

“Sit down.”

She responded to his sharp command and retreated behind the table. He took a deep breath.

“Do you know what happens between a man and a woman?”

“Of course. Caro told me.”

“And did she explain what happens to a man when he’s inflamed?”

“With carnal desire, you mean.”

“Exactly. There comes a certain point when he no longer has the slightest inclination to control himself, and I’m perilously close. My cock is
painfully
inflamed so unless you intend for me to relieve you of your virginity you should keep your distance.” This was plain speaking but he wasn’t up to euphemism. If his crudeness scared her away, so much the better. Indeed, her eyes widened in shock, then she pursed her lips and wriggled in her seat. “Keep still. You’re not helping.”

“I think I might be a bit inflamed myself.”

He hadn’t thought himself capable of mirth in his present state of agony but that made him smile. Damn, she was sweet. And desirable beyond measure. “Tell me about Felix and his brilliant academic career.” That should kill his cockstand stone dead.

“I’d rather talk about you. Tell me about your education. You know Latin and Greek. Where did you go to school?”

An account of his checkered academic history ought to kill her desire too. “When I was eleven I entered Mr. Pinkley’s Academy. Until then, my education had been . . . intermittent. Every now and then my father would hire a tutor, most likely pretending to be a responsible father in order to impress a lady he was trying to cheat.”

“But he sent you to school in the end?”

“He left the country and Mr. Hooke—Uncle Josiah—enrolled me.”

“What was it like?”

“A small and very strict establishment filled with very unpleasant boys.” So they’d seemed—and acted—but from the perspective of adulthood they’d done no worse than defend their territory from an outsider. “I started by teaching them various games of chance, which they enjoyed until I relieved them of their pocket money. Then they tried to fight me, but I learned self-defense in a hard school and not even a boy twice my size gave me much trouble. Once they discovered they couldn’t bully me, they left me alone.”

“Did you have any friends?”

“Not one. They called me the foreigner and avoided my company.”

“How horrid.”

“It was for the best,” he said, twisting his mouth. “I had nothing to do but study and it turned out I was good at it. Any semblance of a classical education I retain I owe to Mr. Pinkley and his pupils.”

“Then you went to Oxford.”

“I even won a scholarship. I lasted there less than a year.”

“Oh, I know what happened next. Caro told me the story often. The four of you were sent down for breaking into the Bodleian Library.”

“Who knew that we were violating a sacred oath? I thought it was a prank.”

“Whose idea was it?”

“Robert’s, of course. He was always the leader. That was the end of my formal education. We all took off for Paris together, saw the fall of the Bastille and the Revolution in action. The others came home but I’ve spent most of the ensuing years abroad, living on my wits and my skills as a gamester.”

“I cannot imagine living anywhere but England. My French is terrible.”

“Sweetheart, Europe is full of countries. They don’t all speak French.”

“How many languages can you speak?”

“I can get by in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. I know enough Russian, Polish, and Portuguese to play cards, order dinner, and make love.”

“Have you made love to a lot of women?”

“Hundreds.” He exaggerated. Although he was hardly a model of purity, he’d been too busy for prolonged affairs.

“It must be hard to know so many languages. Don’t you get muddled?”

“I have a facility. I had trouble learning Swedish so left after three weeks.” He didn’t add that he’d run afoul of a nobleman whose wife he’d relieved of her virtue and a large sum of money. There was a limit to how much he could bear to blacken his character in Anne’s eyes.

“Do you miss your life? Do you long to be on your travels again?”

He shook his head slowly as he realized the question was moot. It appeared increasingly unlikely that he could keep the estate, so Europe it would be, and he’d better pray his luck turned or he’d die of starvation. “I expect I’ll be in Italy by spring. Or maybe Portugal. Very hospitable people, the Portuguese.”

“I think it’s a shame,” Anne said, “that you met Robert Townsend. If you’d stayed at Oxford you would have done great things.”

He tasted the notion with a sinking heart. It was an article of faith that his friendships at Oxford had been the best things that ever happened to him. “Robert was my best friend.”

“That’s as may be,” she replied. “I know we’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead but from what Caro told me, and now you, he was nothing but trouble.”

“My uncle disowned me after Oxford,” he said softly, speaking mostly to himself.

“Yet he left you Hinton.”

He imagined living at Hinton, leading a useful life as a landlord, improving the estate. He envisioned a wife and children. This wife and their children. His own family. A pain in his heart made him wonder if he was dying.

“Yes. He gave me another chance. Too bad there isn’t a chance in hell I can make it good.”

T
ravis insisted on giving up his room next to Marcus’s, and Anne insisted Marcus take his own. She huddled under the blankets and thought about Marcus in his large bed, just the other side of the wall. Without recalling everything about the night of her rescue, she retained an impression of his body enclosing hers, keeping her warm and safe. Her flesh shivered at the memory, but not with cold. She wore another of his shirts to bed. She now recognized the aching feeling below her belly. She wanted his hands on her skin, not his linen.

After half an hour or so, she left her bed and the room and opened the door to his, driven by wishes that overcame doubt and reason. Was she foolish to offer herself to him? Probably. Rejecting every precept of her upbringing, she surged forward to take what she wanted. Darkness, leavened only by the glow from the fireplace, lent her courage. She tiptoed up to the shadowy mound of bedclothes, assessing his breathing. Unaccustomed to sharing a room, she couldn’t be sure if he was asleep. Closing her eyes, she lingered for a moment, not from fear but to enjoy the intimacy of sharing this little dark corner of the world with the man she loved, and the anticipation of uncharted joys.

As she slid under the covers his heat welcomed her and his scent enveloped her senses. She reached for him, tentatively exploring the firm contours of his arm and shoulder, the texture of skin beneath the scanty hair on his chest. Desire pooled below.

His muscles tensed under her fingers. “Anne?” He wasn’t asleep now.

“Were you expecting someone else?” she asked with a nervous laugh.

“I wasn’t expecting anyone. Were you cold in your room?”

“Perhaps.”

“If you came in because you were cold, I am sorry,” he said, as though suffering strangulation, “but you’ll have to leave.”

“What if I wasn’t cold?”

“Then you have precisely five seconds to change your mind or it’ll be too late. Think about it.”

She let her heart and her body do the thinking. “One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five,” she counted. “Too late. I wasn’t cold. I want you, Marcus.” There, she’d said it.

He muttered something that sounded like an oath, a whisper of resignation as though tried beyond all bearing. A final stab of uncertainty melted into relief when he rolled over and gathered her in, so they lay on their sides, face to face. Thank God. She’d been waiting for this, wanting this, forever. It was like being home in a strange place, setting out on the most thrilling adventure without a single qualm.

“Anne.” He drew out the syllable so that her plain name became a lyric of a beautiful song. His hands stroked her head. “My Anne.” The use of the possessive thrilled her to the core. Then he took her mouth in a deep kiss that lasted an age. Nothing had ever been so delicious or so right. With every nerve and instinct she owned she knew she was in the right place doing the right thing. The universe shrank to two joined mouths.

Just as she began to want more, he read her mind. His hands—how she loved his hands—pushed up her shirt, caressed her ribs, and found the breasts that longed for him. She arched forward, demanding more, and meeting the hard evidence of his desire.

How he managed to remove her garment she couldn’t be sure. They must have stopped kissing but the separation was mercifully brief and within seconds they were skin to skin between the sheets, a tangle of linen and hands seeking each other’s touch. Being under cover in the pitch dark dispelled any inhibitions. She discovered how different and how wonderful the male body was, hard and a little rough. She traced the central ridge of his back, pressed the ticklish center of her palms against his hips and around to the taut hills of his buttocks.

Her breasts felt huge under his fingers and her nipples glowed like burning candle flames when he pinched them, not enough to hurt, merely sending sharp spirals shooting down her torso.