The Taming of the Rake (12 page)

A knock on the door startled her, and she dropped the soap, causing a small splash that, naturally, caught her exactly in the eye, so that she was blinking and squinting as she looked toward the door and called out, “Yes? Who’s there?”

“It is I, Mrs. Claridge, your husband,” Beau said with what she thought was unnecessary volume from the other side of the thin door.

Still rubbing at her stinging eye, Chelsea turned her head toward the door as if she might be able to see through it to the idiot on the other side. “What did you say?”

“Don’t bother to get up if you’re already in bed, sweetest. I have a key.”

“What! No, don’t you—oh, God,” she said as the door opened, and Beau walked in, closing it behind him as she grabbed the thin toweling sheet the chambermaid had left, pulled it over her and sank down into the water. “Honestly, Oliver, not again…”

He’d stopped just inside the door, had turned to one side and seemed to be at least pretending to avert his eyes. But the room was small, and he was tall, and the tub was fairly low. And there were no bubbles. If she put aside the towel, maybe then he’d turn around and—no, she couldn’t look too eager. This being a lady business did have its drawbacks.

“I will count to five, Oliver. No, three. No more than three. And you will be on the other side of that door.”

“I can’t believe you’re still in there. You take longer at your bath than any six women I know.”

Ah, he was embarrassed. Well, she supposed at least one of them should be.

“Oh? You’ve made a small vocation out of interrupting women in their baths? Don’t you think that’s rather odd, Oliver? Oh, yes, and once again—get out!”

“I’m sorry, but I’ve nowhere else to go. Where’s the chambermaid?” he asked, still standing where he was, just as if his boots had somehow become rooted to the floor.

“Out purchasing me a pistol so I might shoot you,” Chelsea told him, doing her best not to laugh. What a silly game they were playing. But perhaps it wasn’t a game, for he really did look uncomfortable. But then he seemed to collect himself. “Oliver, what are you doing? Oliver! Don’t you dare take off your coat!”

“I’m not going to sleep in this. It’s bad enough I have to stand up in it all day,” he told her, shrugging out of the hacking jacket and tossing it on the bed. “I could only arrange the one tub, Chelsea, and that cost me a guinea, so if you think you’re done, I’d like to wash away this dirt before ice chips form in there. Oh, and only this one room. Therefore, until we depart in the morning, you are Mrs. Claridge. I’m protecting your reputation, you understand. You should probably thank me.”

“
What
are you talking about? Have you been drinking your dinner?” She’d seen his traveling bag in the room, but had only thought the porter had brought it
here by mistake. But he was planning to sleep here? Her naked body seemed to clench in on itself as she remembered the only night rail she’d brought with her, the one she and Edith had been forced to select from Abigail’s wardrobe. Sweet Abigail had had a penchant for silk. And ruffles. And not much else. He’d probably take one look at it and run screaming from the room.

Beau put his hand on the door latch, still half turned away from her. “It’s a small inn, Chelsea, and they’ve only got the one single room. Everyone else is sleeping in the attics, lined up like cord wood, cheek by jowl, snoring and spitting, and hoping to rob each other blind during the night. I’ve seen them in the taproom, and I have to tell you, some of them are fairly…ripe. You wouldn’t wish that on me, now would you?”

“If I said I did, would that make me a horrible person? There’s only the one bed, you know.”

“I’ll sleep on the floor.”

He was going to give up this easily? Shame on him! “This floor? Then I suggest you don’t bother about the bath, and worry more about the bugs. If it weren’t still raining, I’d say we strike out again in the dark, and hope for something better. A damp cave, perhaps? With bats in it.”

“Chelsea, you’re wasting time. Very well, I’m going to the stables to check on our mounts, but I’ll be back in ten minutes. You’ve been warned.”

“I’ve been
warned,
” she said singsong as the door shut behind him. “The man has
warned
me. Aren’t I the fortunate one?”

And then she realized that what she was was the
naked
one, and she hopped up and out of the tub so quickly she forgot about the sopping wet toweling and tripped over it, nearly crashing to the floor.

There was no other toweling sheet. She’d used the only one to cover herself.

“Of course,” she said, looking about her for something with which to dry herself and finding nothing. She had to do something. Quickly. She was not going to look like some half-drowned cat when he returned!

Her wet hair dripping down her back and into her eyes, she all but tore Beau’s traveling bag open and grabbed a perfectly folded white shirt she’d concluded she needed more than he did and dried herself with it as best she could.

It only seemed fair, as this whole thing was clearly his fault.

The chambermaid—more probably called the
serving wench,
as chambermaids at least pretended they cared about their charges—had not laid out her night rail, nor had she hung the sodden riding habit up next to the fire, rendering that more thorough concealment useless at the moment.

She dug the terrible night rail out of her own bag and pulled it on over her head so that it dropped onto her shoulders…and then promptly slid off her shoulders and settled around her waist. Abigail had looked the forest sprite in her portrait, but clearly she had grown considerably more
substantial
over the years since the painting had been commissioned.

As she had the previous nights, Chelsea fished the drapery cord she’d taken from her bedchamber at Blackthorn and tied it twice around her waist to hold the night rail at least marginally in place, and then turned her attention to the bed.

The coverlet looked at least reasonably clean, but even if it was alive with bugs, it was her only hope of at least looking decent, as opposed to ridiculous, when Beau returned.

Elopements, according to the novels she’d read, in which elopements always seemed to figure highly, were not quite as romantical as their authors suggested. There were logistics to be considered, and none of them were very pleasant. A mad dash across the moors, an irate father in hot pursuit, was never mentioned in the same breath as long hours on horseback, inferior inns or drenching rainstorms.

And the main participants, of course, had always been madly in love, so if there had been impediments, they probably hadn’t noticed them.

But still, Beau was doing the best he could, given the short time he’d had to plan this elopement, and it wasn’t his fault that the two of them weren’t in love. Why, they hadn’t even seen each other in seven years, and she’d been a brat then, and he’d been an idiot.

Chelsea giggled at that thought in spite of herself. But by the time the key turned in the lock once more, she still managed to be seated on the hearth rug, tied into her night rail, the coverlet wrapped around her and her brushes in her hands, ready to dry her hair by the fire.
She told herself she might look at least slightly romantical.

And Beau seemed to agree with that assessment—at first.

“Lovely,” he said, locking the door behind him. “The firelight dancing in your hair, the coverlet puddled around you as you pose by the fire. A very pretty scene, Chelsea. I commend you on your ability to organize yourself so quickly when faced with—is that my shirt on the floor? What happened to it? Bloody hell, woman, that’s my only clean shirt!”

So much for romantical.

“It’s one more than I have left,” she told him, dispassionately looking to the shirt that now lay damp and crumpled on the floor, ridiculously angered that he’d not finished his compliment. “Unfortunately, it is a better shirt than it is a towel, but it’s all we’ve got.” She chanced looking up at him, for she hadn’t heard any signs that he might be even at this moment undressing himself. “Why, Oliver, where
is
that smile you were wearing the first time you came into this room?”

“I look forward to meeting your Reverend Flotley, if only to tell him what a lucky escape he’s had, and to perhaps ask him to pray for me,” Beau grumbled.

Chelsea couldn’t help herself. She giggled.

“Oh, wonderful. The woman is amused.” Beau sat down on the edge of the bed, taking a deep breath even as he ran a hand through his thick crop of hair. Between the hat he’d worn all day and the rain, any thought of gentlemanly styling had long since departed, and he
looked mussed, and young…and more than slightly appealing.

“No, I’m not. Not really,” Chelsea told him honestly. “I know we’re to be married, and that even if you had earlier harbored any thought to renege on your promise made back in London, I am now so compromised that you really have no choice left but either to marry me or condemn yourself to being even more disreputable than Society has labeled you. However, Oliver, putting all of that together, and not leaving out that, yes, I was the one who did the proposing of this plan, I have to tell you—oh, blast, now I’ve tied my tongue in a knot! What was it I was going to say?”

“I think you were about to remind me that you are a gently bred female and, while many anticipate their wedding vows, you have limits to the rules you will bend, you are appalled at our current situation which is not at all what you’d thought it would be, and you would be greatly comforted if I’d be a gentleman and take myself off to sleep in the stables.”

Chelsea considered this statement and then nodded her agreement. Clearly he was not going to take advantage of their situation. The dolt. “Yes, I would say that about sums it all up. Thank you.”

Beau got up from the bed and began unbuttoning his waistcoat. “I’m not sleeping in the stables, Chelsea.”

Her heart soared. Her stomach, on the other hand, unexpectedly began to feel slightly queasy. Perhaps he wasn’t a dolt. Still, she could not look too eager. “Oh, but—”

“Close your eyes, turn your head or offer to wash my back. Those are your choices.”

She turned her head. But only to hide her smile.

S
HE WASN’T A CHILD
. He didn’t think she was extremely innocent, although he knew instinctively that she was a virgin. You don’t grow up the daughter of an earl without knowing the value of virginity on the open market.

But he knew she knew what the world was about, or at least thought she did, in theory. As she’d reminded him from time to time—she read books. When she’d corrected him on a small matter of Greek mythology, he’d decided she’d read whole libraries.

She knew she was beautiful, desirable. Nobody with eyes like hers, hair like hers, a slim yet luscious body like hers could be unaware of her beauty even if she’d grown up in a house without mirrors.

And she’d been flirting with him. Occasionally. Possibly. Unless he was reading too much into what he saw, hoping that would assuage his conscience as he mentally pictured slowly ridding her of that damnable riding habit.

They’d been on the road for three days, three nights. Apart only to sleep, getting to know each other in a way many people would never know someone if they knew that someone for a lifetime.

They’d shared meat pies he’d purchased at an inn on the outskirts of Grantham, and he’d held her head as she’d been sick at the stomach an hour later, vowing never to eat meat pies again in her lifetime, if she lived to be one hundred, which she probably wouldn’t do, as she was certainly going to die at any moment.

She hadn’t wanted pity. She’d been angry. With the meat pie and possibly with herself for having shown weakness, or some such womanly nonsense. But she’d not turned on him, blamed him in any way. Which, of course, made him feel even worse, especially as his own stomach, used to much worse during his time serving under Wellington, had tolerated the meal quite well.

And then she’d rinsed her mouth with a mouthful from the flask of wine he’d handed her, spat out the excellent vintage as if it was water, delicately patted her lips with a handkerchief, asked him to help her back onto the sidesaddle and never mentioned the incident again.

That took pluck. A man had to admire pluck, if not her abuse of good wine.

He admired a lot about Lady Chelsea Mills-Beckman. And he had been spending some of his quiet moments forming decidedly detailed ideas for how to show that admiration. With his mouth, his hands, his…

She had yet to complain about anything. Had never asked him to stop early, or insisted on knowing how far it was before the next resting place. He’d seen the blister at the base of her thumb while they were eating lunch just today, and knew it had come from holding
the reins for long hours, but when he’d asked her about it she told him she hadn’t even noticed it.

She was a terrible liar. He’d learned that, too.

She delighted in the countryside, each new vista that opened before them, bright with soft English sun, green as only England could be. He was seeing his country through new eyes, thanks to her. Although he knew he would never see what all the fuss was about with sheep. Chelsea had been very taken with the sight of a field filled with the things and had made him stop and let her watch them as a barefoot youth and a small black-and-white dog herded them toward their pen.

Three days, with this their third night. Together. Her smiles. Those flashing eyes that showed her every thought, her every mood. Watching her ride ahead of him at times, her spine straight, her rounded bottom outlined by the stretch of the habit of her skirt.

There wasn’t much a person could hide when traveling by horseback for nearly ten hours a day, isolated, dependent on each other, with no chaperone or anyone else to ease any tension, smooth any sharp conversational edges.

Which meant she had to know that he wanted her.

Which, Beau also knew, made him a bastard in more ways than he was used to thinking of himself.

Now, as he unbuttoned his shirt, he watched Chelsea, her back turned to him as she sat on the hearth, pulling her brushes through her hair. Even damp, it seemed to want to curl around her wrist; a living thing, glorious
and bewitching, reaching more than halfway down her back. Wild, free. Hair a man could lose himself in.

Did she know she was driving him insane? If he was a betting man, and at times he had been, he would say that she did. Did she know what she was daring? On that head, he wasn’t so sure.

Beau spied the bootjack and used it to remove his boots, and then sat on the single rough wooden chair and removed his hose, noting that there were a few small burrs on one of them because they’d quickly left the road when they’d heard a coach approaching around a bend, and he’d chosen badly, ending them in a thicket of some sort of prickly bushes. A few more encounters like that, and he’d arrive in Scotland with his hose in tatters.

And a dirty shirt. He shook his head as he looked at his last clean shirt, now damp and wrinkled as it lay on the floor. She’d hung her riding habit on the fender to dry it, but hadn’t picked up his shirt. He guessed that fell under the heading of
so there
as far as Chelsea was concerned.
Insist on bathing in this room, insist upon sleeping in this room and expect no help from me.

He didn’t blame her. There had been another chamber he could have used, but it was on another floor, and he knew this was not the sort of inn where he could rest easy a full floor away from her.

If it hadn’t been for the rain, they’d be just outside of Gateshead by now, where he’d planned for them to rest for a day before pushing off to the border. Instead, they had been forced to stop here, and if this inn wasn’t a
haven for highwaymen, smugglers and assorted felons, he would be mightily surprised.

His story to the innkeeper had, he’d thought, been quick-witted and bordering on brilliant. They were the Claridges, staying with a party at the country estate of “his lordship”—after all, there had to be a lordship somewhere in the vicinity. They’d been out for a ride, got caught in the rain and sent their groom back to the estate to inform his lordship that they’d return in the morning, as Mrs. Claridge refused to travel a step farther in such inclement weather.

In other words: slit our throats and rob us and “his lordship” will have you hanged forthwith.

Still, he’d wake Chelsea at least an hour before dawn and have the two of them out of here before the sun rose, just to be safe. And he’d sleep with his knife under his pillow and his pistols on the table beside the bed.

Beau looked at the tub. What was he waiting for? The water wasn’t getting any warmer. Hell of a time for a belated attack of modesty.

He looked toward Chelsea again, still with her back to him, to see that she was now finger-combing her hair, holding out the long tresses toward the meager fire as she did so. Suddenly he found it difficult to swallow. The silence in the small room was deafening.

He was a man. She was a woman. They were alone together. She was barely dressed. He was nearly undressed.

If ever there was a recipe for disaster, this was it. Still, not exactly a disaster. They were going to be
married, after all. They’d only be anticipating their vows by a few days. What was the harm in that, after all they’d already been through?

God, I’m a fool.

He opened the buttons on his buckskins and slipped them off, then quickly lifted one foot over the edge of the tub, as if he was the maiden in the room.

And stepped on something. The soap. Before the short, pithy curse was halfway out of his mouth, he was on his back in the small tub, his head under water, his legs stuck in the air.

“Oliver!”

“No!” he all but shouted as he managed to right himself. “I’m all right.” Wiping water out of his eyes, he shot her a look, to see that she was on her feet, and staring at him, her eyes wide. He pulled his knees up to his chest. “Really. I’m fine.”

“Did you slip? It sounded as if you hit your head. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Now that you mention it,” he said, raising one hand to the back of his head and wincing as he felt the small lump that was probably going to grow considerably larger. He looked at his knees, sticking up out of the water. Bare knees weren’t half as scandalous as the alternative would have been if he’d landed in the tub face-first. “No, I’m fine. I stepped on the soap, that’s all. Go…go back to what you were doing.”

“I was attempting to dry my hair,” she told him, still staring at him, “until some great lummox sent bath water splashing everywhere, just as if a huge rock had
been plopped into a pond. Look what you’ve done. We may as well be out in the rain.”

“Chelsea, please, turn your back,” he said as she moved closer to pick up his now sodden shirt, look at it and then drop it again. He probably should be grateful she didn’t attempt to strangle him with the sleeves. “We’re not married. This is entirely improper. Even if we were married, I would consider this improper.”

“Improper? Oh, piffle, Oliver. If you cared a whit about proper and improper, you wouldn’t be here, would you? I’m seeing you at a disadvantage—not that I really saw, you know…anything. Well, your knees. And your chest. And, just for a moment, really, your—”

“For the love of God, woman.”

“That’s what’s bothering you, you know,” she suggested, her eyes shining. “The impropriety. But it was not improper for you to enter the room while I was in my bath?
Twice?
It isn’t very comfortable, is it, being put at such a disadvantage? And all while that water gets colder and colder. Are you sure your head is all right? Really, it was a very loud bang. You’re not going to pass out on me or anything? You could drown in there.”

“I’ll live.”

She nodded her head. “Well, if you’re sure. You have a lot of hair on your chest, don’t you?”

“Chelsea, I swear to you, if you don’t be quiet and turn your back now, when I get out of here…”

“Oh, all right,” she said, finally turning her back to him. “But it’s very nice, I suppose. Blond, just like on
your head. Does it ever itch? It looks soft, but I suppose you’d know best.”

Still rather nonplussed, Beau reached for the soap that had caused him to come to grief and began quickly lathering his body. “You’re doing this on purpose, aren’t you? You have absolutely no sense of shame.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake, Oliver. We’ve been on our own for three days. I have to apply to you to stop whenever I feel the need to excuse myself and go into the bushes if we’re not near an inn. I cast up my accounts in a roadside ditch while you watched and muttered ridiculous platitudes. How much maidenly shame could any of that possibly leave me?”

“I suppose I can concede that you’ve got a point there.” He reached over the side of the tub and picked up the wet shirt, knowing it wasn’t going to do him much good, and got out of the tub. Moments later he was struggling to force his still wet legs into his buckskins, for he usually slept in the buff and had not brought any nightclothes with him. “All right, I’m decent, or as decent as I care to be at the moment.”

She turned around yet again, not doing a very good job of hiding her smile.

“Someday we will look back at all of this and laugh,” she said. “At least I know I will. I will gather our grandchildren around me and tell them of the day their venerable grandfather did battle with soap, and lost. I can say venerable, I’m sure. After all you are so much older than I, the mere slip of a girl you snatched up and romantically carried off to—”

That did it. He had borne all he was going to bear without getting some of his own back!

In five quick strides he was in front of her, his hands on her shoulders. He captured her open, laughing mouth with his own, grinding his lips against hers in a combination of frustration and a nearly uncontrollable desire to sit himself down on the floor and then roll about, laughing like a loon.

But the unexpected amusement vanished as quickly as it had come when Chelsea slid her arms around his bare back and held on tight.

He’d thought the tension he’d been feeling for at least a day and a half had been his alone, but clearly he’d been wrong. She’d been feeling it, too. Like a watch spring, wound tighter and tighter, they’d been aware of each other, of the future, of what this mad dash to Scotland meant. Marriage. A shared bed. His hands on her. Her introduction to a part of life she might have heard about, read about, but was now going to experience for herself.

He cupped her face in his hands and continued to kiss her, teasing her with his tongue, drinking her in, breathing her sigh as she melted against him, the coverlet sliding to the floor as she ran her hands over his bare back, setting his skin on fire.

“Finally,” she breathed as he lowered his hands, skimming them down over her shoulders, easily dislodging the material that covered them, so that she was suddenly bare to the waist.

And clearly unashamed. He could hardly hide his surprise.

But he managed it. He’d have cursed himself for a thousand kinds of fool if he hadn’t.

His mouth still locked with hers—otherwise she might say something else, and he didn’t dare chance any interruptions at this critical point—Beau cupped her bare breasts, amazed at their perfection. He might not be able to see them—he’d correct that lapse later—but his hands told his rattled brain they were the two most beautiful breasts in the history of the world.

And her nipples, as he grazed them with the pads of his thumbs, were the most responsive bits of flesh in the entire universe, turning instantly into tight, hard buds that clearly appreciated the attention he was giving them.

“Oh…good,” Chelsea murmured against his mouth, holding herself very still as he stroked, stroked, stroked. “They always feel…strange when I look at you. I guess they wanted this. Yes, please do that some more…”

Maybe he should let her talk. Beau knew words could serve as an aphrodisiac. He’d read that somewhere. But until this moment he hadn’t realized that his brain could turn his body rock hard and ready simply by opening its ears.

And why the devil was he trying to think anyway? In the lexicon listing Gifts From The Gods, he’d just been written down as having been handed the top prize.

He scooped Chelsea up in his arms and carried her to the bed, laying her down gently but quickly, before whatever aberration had struck her melted away and she remembered they were in a sordid country inn, not
yet wed and had only been in each other’s company for a few days. Strange, glorious days.