Again, My Lord: A Twist Series Novel (9 page)

As he neared her it became all too clear that the gown was not a true gown at all, rather an undergarment. Clinging damply to her breasts and thighs, it revealed …
everything
: taut nipples, breasts round as peaches, slender waist, dark cluster of hair at the apex of her thighs, and long, shapely legs.

Look at her face.

“Lady Holland,” he said and tugged his greatcoat together at the front.
Look at her face
. “Would you care to return to the inn at this time?”

“No, thank you, my lord. I am happy here.” She bent and took up a handful of mud, and slapped it against her chest, then rubbed it around to the back of her neck. “Nobody else is using the street at present, as you can see. Oh! There is one of the sheep now. Already? I hadn’t realized they entered the street quite this early. I shall have to jot that down, though of course the note will disappear by dawn. I shall simply have to memorize it.”

“It’s devilishly chilly out,” he said in as common a tone as he could muster, moving closer to her. Eyes peered out of every window on the street and the other guests at the inn had clustered in the doorway. “Perhaps you should draw your cloak over your … that is … close your cloak.” He glanced at her exposed body and regretted it. By God, she was beautiful. Perfectly formed, like the Greek statue in her bedchamber, but real. And smiling with thorough abandon.

“Should I?” she said. “Do you dislike a woman undressing on the high street and splashing in the mud?”

“Not particularly. But the constable of this village might.”

“I haven’t seen him since yesterday morning. I believe he spends his time mostly at the pub. It is over there, at the other end of the village, if you wish to retrieve him.”

He removed his greatcoat. “You can put this on.”

“You really do want me to cover up, don’t you?”

“It would be wise, yes.”

“Why? Because covered in all this mud I am not sufficiently appealing to your aesthetic senses?”

“Covered with mud or not, you are entirely appealing to all of my senses. However, I am not your husband. Nor are the various villagers and travelers staring at you now. It will be best for you to cover up and return to the inn.”

“My husband demands that at home I wear gowns that barely cover my bosom. He likes to ogle and fondle. I might be in conference with the housekeeper, and he will walk by and caress my breast, while she is sitting right there. Honestly, I don’t know why she remains, except sometimes I think perhaps she feels sorry for me. And of course the servants all adore Harry. I think they stay mostly for him. He is the sweetest child.”

“I’ve no doubt.” He wondered if she had been drinking at the pub today, and if her husband knew that he was a thorough knave. “Do put this on.” He ventured close and she allowed him to drape his greatcoat around her shoulders.

“When I wish to leave the house,” she said, looking up at him with eyes shrouded by rain-speckled lashes, “he demands that I cover myself from chin to toe. He is concerned that I will attract inappropriate attention. He is a very jealous husband.”

“If you were mine, I think I would be too,” came from his mouth without forethought.

Her smile faded. “Would you? How vile of you.” She bent and scooped up another handful of mud. She slapped it against his chest. “There. You look much better now.”

“You know, I liked this waistcoat without the mud.”

“Did you?” She raised a hand dripping with mud and caressed his jaw. “Did you like that cheek without mud too?”

“I suppose so.” The pleasure of her touch was hot and sharp and went through his entire body. “But then, I haven’t seen it with mud. Not in twenty years, at least.”

Now her eyes looked a bit wild. He understood. There was fire between them. He had convinced himself that he imagined it six years ago. Clearly, he had not.

“I misspoke,” he said somewhat roughly.

“About what?”

“I think if you were mine, I would let you wear whatever you wanted, including a sodden chemise and mud-covered cloak.”

Rising and falling swiftly, her breasts pressed at the wet linen. “You would?”

“Your own style clearly suits you.” He willed his pulse to steady. “Now, will you return to the inn and put on some clothes?”

She backed away from him and cast off his coat. It landed in four inches of muddy water.

“No. I will not be confined!” she exclaimed. “Not today of all days. Today I aim to do whatever I wish, and defy the consequences. For there won’t really be any, you know.”

“If I weren’t standing here, the consequences of this particular act of defiance might not be precisely what you wish.”

“Again with the noble protector?”

“Yes.”

“And where was that man when I
actually
needed him?” She swirled away from him and strode toward the inn. “Go away. I neither need you nor want you here ruining my fun.”

“You are being childish.”

“And you are being a prig.”

“No, I am not. I am being really quite reasonable. And by the by, I admit that I was probably a prig six years ago. But I haven’t been one in ages.”

“You have a stick up your arse, my lord. It was there six years ago and it is obviously still firmly in place.”

“Nicely graphic, thank you.”

She laughed carelessly and started off toward the inn.

He followed her.

As she entered the inn she winked at two tradesmen standing in the doorway.

The girl in frothy white covered her mouth with her palm. “My cloak!”

Calista shrugged off the garment, effectively gluing every male eye in the place to her gloriously exposed body. That Tacitus wanted to immediately take the round globes of her buttocks into his hands and worship them did not make a damn bit of difference to the acute fury he felt seeing other men ogling her behind too.

She hung the cloak on the peg. “Thank you for its use, darling,” she said to the girl. “Don’t worry. Tomorrow it will be as good as new, I promise.” With a saucy smile at the girl’s menfolk, she took the stairs two at a time.

Now every eye, male and female, had turned to him.

“She is unwell,” he muttered, and followed her muddy footprints up the stairs. Her door was shut and she did not answer his knock. Retiring to his own bedchamber, he changed out of his stained clothing and took up a book.

Reading never failed to steady his ill temper, and it had the desired effect now. By dinnertime he felt pacific enough to knock on her door before he descended for a glass of claret in the taproom. She did not answer, and he continued downstairs.

Within moments, without prompting, his companions from earlier at the card table informed him that Lady Holland had gone to the pub. She was, apparently, the talk of the entire village.

He could not resist the temptation. He walked the length of the high street toward the ford, and found the pub. The place was packed with patrons.

In the middle of the room, she danced.

On top of a table.

This time she wore an unexceptional gown that nevertheless clung to her legs as she gyrated, and her hair flowed about her shoulders in spectacular abandon. She was not alone in her tabletop defiance of propriety and good sense. Several men danced jigs atop chairs, and a woman who looked as though she’d spent too many years in this pub was actually sitting on the bar, swaying to and fro to a fiddle’s cheerful sawing.

But beautiful, mad Calista Holland was by far the main attraction.

Swallowing over the crushing disappointment rising in him—the sort he hadn’t felt in six years—he went to her, remonstrated with her until she descended from the table, and eventually escorted her from the pub. All the way to the inn, as she sang aloud, twirled in circles, and kicked up mud from the soggy street, he silently cursed himself and her and most of all fate.

Obviously he had not learned a thing six years ago.

And obviously she had, in fact, changed.

Calista had never
before understood the challenges involved in herding sheep. The animals milled about in the muck every which way, groups of them hustling this way and that like … well, like sheep, probably.

But her experiment was not a complete failure. She had devised the ideal costume: a gown of pale blue muslin with a thick white petticoat puffing out at the ankles; white stockings and sturdy leather shoes, all now covered in mud; a high poke bonnet tied about her chin with a thick blue ribbon; and a shepherd’s staff. The staff wasn’t an actual staff, rather a freestanding candlestick holder she had stolen from the church. But it suited the purpose well enough.

As a child she, Evelina, and Gregory had played dress-ups with the cast-off clothes of their parents and the servants’ old livery, and she had adored it. But she hadn’t dressed in costume since. Years ago, her father snatched her family from London on the eve of the first grand masquerade she had been invited to attend. Richard, of course, believed a disguise would allow her opportunity to dally in secret with other men, and never allowed her to attend such parties.

Now she was certain she looked a perfect picture. She only lacked company. She wished Harry were here to giggle with her. Evelina too. They both adored a good lark, Harry because he was five and Evie because she was Evie.

Apparently the Marquess of Dare did not adore larks. Today, at least, he was merely glowering at her from afar rather than dragging her back to the inn, no doubt because she was not behaving immodestly.

Despite his dark disapproval yesterday he had not scolded her. It was only when she had returned to her bedchamber, washed, and climbed into bed that she realized she had been waiting for him to shout at her. To call her empty-headed. To strike her.

But of course he would not have. As he had pointed out, he was not her husband.

A sheep butted against her leg. She poked it with the candleholder and it moved. The sheep beside it moved too. And then the sheep beside that. And then a dozen sheep were moving in the direction in which she had poked the first one. Directly toward Mrs. Elliott’s turnip greens. An hour before they usually discovered the greens.

She had changed something!

“I’ve done it!”

“Hurrah, my lady!” Harriet Tinkerson shouted from the doorway of her shop and clapped her little hands gloved in jonquil kidskin.

Calista gave the candlestick a triumphant shake. Harriet had liked the gift of delectable little French butter biscuits from the bakery that Calista traded for the use of the bonnet. She wasn’t so bad, after all. And Calista was coming to truly like Elena Cooke. Her gowns were exquisitely made, including this one, and she was rational and serene. She lacked patrons, though, and had nearly admitted to Calista this morning that her experiment in owning a shop was not proceeding as she had hoped.

“What’s this, miss? Trying to steel my flock right out from under me while I napped?” The shepherd waded through the sheep toward her, smiling with all three of his teeth in a pleasant, sun-swarthy face.

“No, indeed. I only hoped to keep them company until you woke from your nap. I am now in awe of your skill.”

“T’aint skill, miss.” He doffed his cap and looked fondly about him at the milling bundles of white punctuated by black ears and noses. “’Tis affection.”

“Affection? For the sheep?” She looked about at the animals. “You actually care about them?”

“Aye, miss. Like they was my little sisters. Ai! Ai!” he called out. “Come on now, girls. We’d best be on our way afore Mrs. Elliott discovers Sally’s gone and et her turnip greens. Good day, miss.”

While he ushered them away like the pied piper of cloven-hooved creatures, she untied the bonnet and walked to Harriet’s shop.

“Dear Lady Holland,” Harriet gushed, “
do
come in for a cup of tea and one or two of those tasty biscuits you brought me.”

“I would be delighted to, but I have an appointment elsewhere.” She gave Harriet the borrowed bonnet. “Good afternoon, and my thanks again.”

Exiting the church several minutes later
sans
candleholder, she saw the marquess in the inn doorway. He watched her approach.

“Has Little Bo Peep lost her sheep?” he said as she passed by him. Today she had spoken with him only briefly at breakfast. He thought they were strangers, and yet still he teased. Either he had changed, as he had said yesterday, or she had not really known him six years ago.

Of course she hadn’t really known him. She had believed he would run away with her.

She went toward the stairs. “She has given them over into their master’s care, with alacrity.”

“You might have been injured,” he said to her back, his voice no longer light. “They are dumb animals, but not without power en masse.”

“Ah. There is the old Lord Dare back again.” She pivoted to him. “Were you born sixty years old?”

“Were you trapped at ten?” His expressive eyes were hard. “Because that would explain this.” He gestured to her costume.

“I was only having a bit of fun. You might try it sometime, if you can unbend your forbidding lip long enough to smile.”

“Do you know, last night I thought you merely rude—”

“You nearly ran over my son with your horse. I was upset.”

“—but today I think you are simply childish. And unkind. I don’t deserve your insults now, just like I did not deserve them six years ago.”

No quick defense came to her tongue. She was stunned.

For a moment longer he stared at her, then he shook his head and disappeared into the taproom.

And quite abruptly Calista understood that she wanted him to argue with her, at least to chastise her. She had hoped he would call her out for dressing up in this ridiculous costume, and then she could quarrel with him, and he would say unexpected things and make unexpected revelations and look at her with his gorgeously thundercloud eyes like a war was waging inside of him.

Instead, he simply did not care. He thought her foolish and immature and unkind. But ultimately she meant nothing to him. Worse, she was no better than the girl he had disapproved of all those years ago.

“This is the worst day of my life,” she said aloud to the empty foyer. “The very worst day.”

She climbed the stairs to the bedchamber she had come to loathe, sat down on her bed, and dropped her face into her hands.

“The very, very worst day.”

She fell asleep on the end of the bed, still wearing the shepherdess costume. She awoke to the throbbing of the church bell and the drone of pouring rain outside, in her nightgown, dry and tucked under the covers.

“The worst, very, very worst day,” she muttered as the bell tolled on and on and on.