An Improper Proposal (15 page)

It wasn’t fair. He was using weapons on her against which she hadn’t the slightest defense. She was careful not to lift her gaze from her work. She did not want to have to meet that searching gaze, on top of everything else.

“Now, be fair,” Hudson admonished his brother, mockly indignant. ‘That’s not why Ross married Georgiana.”

“No?” Raleigh had kicked all of the sheets off Payton’s bed, and now reclined upon it like some kind of hairy odalisque. “Then why’d he do it?”

“Because he couldn’t get her any other way,” Hudson declared.

“Oh, that’s right.”

Payton directed Drake’s arms through the openings in his waistcoat. “You’re all,” she said, “nothing but a packet of horn-fisted galley-growlers.”

“Oh, what are you bein’ so missish about, Pay?” Raleigh demanded. “I swear, for someone who thinks she’d make such a fine ship captain, you don’t have very much sympathy for your crew. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were as hung-over as any of us. That’s twice now you’ve damn near snapped our heads off.”

Payton glowered at him. “Care to try for a third?”

“Oh, don’t mind Payton,” Hudson said. “She’s just sore because on top of giving Drake the
Constant
, Ross won’t let ’er go on the Far East run with us.”

“I,” Payton declared, “wouldn’t want to go to the corner with any of you, let alone the Far East.”

Hudson lowered himself onto the window seat from which Payton had climbed the night before. “While you and I are havin’ the time of our lives, Ral, out on the open seas, Payton’s goin’ to be up in London, tryin’ to decide just how much of her brand-new bosom she should let show when she does her curtsy at St. James …”

“I say all of it,” Raleigh advised. “After all, the king’s eyesight is not as good as it once was, and it’s not as if she’s got a whole lot up there. She should just open up her dress and let gravity take its course. That ought to do the trick. They’ll be lining up in droves …

Something fell from Drake’s hand, and landed, with a clatter, upon the floor.

“I say,” Raleigh complained loudly. “Must you make all that racket? My poor head can hardly take much more.”

“What was that?” Hudson had lifted a booted foot, and was looking beneath it, at the parquet floor. “A button?”

“Not at all,” Drake said. Payton glared up, and noticed, with relief, that he’d closed his eyes. “It was just the ring.”

“The ring?” Hudson leapt to his feet. “Bloody hell, man, why didn’t you say so? Raleigh, shake a leg. He’s gone and lost the ring.”

Raleigh rolled over. “So what? No ring, no wedding. We’ll all be able to sleep in.”

Hudson strode over and laid the back of his boot upon his brother’s rear end. “Out of bed, you lazy sod.” He gave Raleigh a terrific shove, sending him flying off the far side of Payton’s bed. “Help me look for the bleeding ring.”

“I’ll show you a ring,” Raleigh declared, rising up to launch himself at his brother.

As the two men fell, wrestling, to the floor, Payton calmly reached down and retrieved the ring from where it had rolled beside her foot.

“This,” she said, holding up the small gold circle, “is what you’re missing, I believe, Captain.”

Drake opened his eyes. “Oh,” he said. Was it her imagination, or did he sound disappointed? “So it is. Thank you, Miss Dixon.”

He held out his hand. For a moment, Payton admired the way the diamonds on the band—there were five of them, in all—glowed, even though the light in the room was so dim. It was a finely crafted ring, a ring that had been in his family, she understood, almost as long as those suits of armor downstairs. She didn’t think about how it would look on her own finger. She would probably have lost it within a month of gaining ownership, or knocked one of the diamonds out. She was not the sort of girl, she knew, who ought to be given diamonds.

She dropped it into Drake’s hand. His fist closed over it, and then he shoved both fist and what it contained into his trouser pocket.

“Thank you,” he said, in his deep voice.

Payton felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. Damn! What was it about this man that affected her so? Why couldn’t she hate him, like she wanted to?

“Well,” she said, dropping her arms and taking a hasty step backward. “There. You[* *]’re finished.”

Drake looked down at himself. He would make, Payton supposed, any girl proud to marry him. His wedding clothes included a fine morning coat of light gray, worn over a waistcoat of darker gray stripe. His trousers were the same dark gray as the stripes. The tails of his morning coat reached almost to his knees. He looked a very fine figure of a man—well, except for the circles under his eyes and the fact that he was still badly in need of a shave—but Payton couldn’t help thinking she liked him a good deal better when he was dressed in nothing more than a pair of trousers, which was the way he’d arrived at her bedroom door that morning.

“I think you’ve forgotten something,” Drake said quietly. Too quietly. She didn’t think she’d heard him aright. Hudson and Raleigh had gone crashing to the floor on top of one another, and it was rather difficult to hear much of anything besides their swearing.

“What?” Payton asked suspiciously.

Mutely, Drake held up a long white band of linen. His cravat.

It was perhaps fortunate for the captain that at that moment, the bedroom door opened, and Georgiana, looking very shocked indeed, walked in. Otherwise, Payton might surely have twisted that cravat round his neck, and kept on twisting it, until he choked, she was that put out with him. As it was, however, Georgiana’s shocked exclamations soon put an end to any and all activity in the room.

“What,” she cried, “is this? Payton, why is Captain Drake in your bedroom?”

“It’s my fault.” Drake seemed to feel duty-bound to come to Payton’s defense. “I needed help dressing, and I couldn’t find Ross—”

“Because he’s down at the church,” Georgiana declared. “Someone had to go and supervise those gardeners of yours. You know they’ve done the whole thing wrong. They used pink roses instead of orange blossom.” She held up a basket of flowers. “All of your boutonnieres are pink, you’ll be alarmed to know. Hudson, Raleigh, would you please stop that?”

Both men collapsed in a tangle of arms and legs. Raleigh lifted his face from the vise-like grip in which his elder brother held his head and said, in a strangled voice, “Hudson started it.”

“I don’t care who started it.” Georgiana thrust the basket of boutonnieres at Payton and strode forward to accost her brothers-in-law. “You have no business being in your sister’s bedroom. Get out! Get out right now! Take Captain Drake back to his room, and see that he shaves. And remember your sister is not your valet, nor are you to loan her out to your friends to serve as theirs.”

Grumbling, the brothers rose to their feet, and staggered out of the room. Drake tried to stay for a few seconds more, apologizing all the while, but Georgiana only shooed him away, politely, but quite emphatically. When all the men were gone, she slammed the door, and turned toward Payton.

“Good Lord,” she said. “If he actually makes it to the church, this morning, I’ll die of shock. I never saw the captain look so ill in my life. What happened to your hair?”

Payton glanced at herself in the mirror above the dressing table. Her hair was curling riotously all over her head. Other than that, however, she thought she looked passable—especially for someone who hadn’t slept a wink. Drake had helped with that: his presence had brought a pink glow to her cheeks, and her lips, still raw from where he’d savaged them the night before, were quite red.

Payton settled down upon the window seat while Georgiana picked up a hairbrush and attacked her curls.

“It’s criminal, you know,” Georgiana was saying, “that Becky Whitby is marrying today, and there isn’t a soul from her own family to watch it. Positively criminal. I know how nervous I was on my wedding day, but thank goodness I had my mother and sisters to support me. Miss Whitby hasn’t anyone. I went to her room first thing this morning, to help her dress, but do you know, she sent me away?”

Payton, watching as the sun, which had finally put in an appearance, began burning holes through the fog, murmured, “No, really?” even though she wasn’t really listening. She was thinking about Drake, of course. How could she not? The sun was hitting all the places in the garden where they’d stood together, not ten hours earlier. It was already warming the marble that had been so cold and wet against her bottom.

“That’s right. She sent me away. She said she wasn’t feeling well. Well, that might have been … well, never mind. Of course, I went back, later, with a cup of tea for her, and by then she was fine. It occurred to me, you know, Payton, that she might not take it amiss if we offered your father’s services to her. To give her away, you know. I mean, it isn’t as if she has anyone else to do it. And do you know, I think she quite fancied the idea.”

Payton, sitting in the window, grunted. The sun had burned away almost all the fog in the garden in a surprisingly short period of time. She could see all the clay walkways now, including the one that led to the hedge maze, several dozen yards away from the fountain where she and Drake had kissed the night before.

Kissed. Where they had devoured one another the night before.

“Although I have to say,” Georgiana went on, as she tucked some pink rosebuds from the basket into Payton’s hair, “I do think Miss Whitby is a little old to wear her hair down at her wedding. I mean, she isn’t exactly your age, Payton. I’m sure she isn’t yet thirty, but I’d be very surprised indeed if she hasn’t seen twenty-five at least. I’m not saying I think she’s lied to anyone … I believe she told Captain Drake she was two and twenty. But I’m two and twenty, and I can’t help feeling that Miss Whitby is older than I am … and I certainly didn’t wear my hair down when I married your brother …”

Through the window, Payton noticed someone moving about the hedge maze. She was very farsighted, which accounted for her so often being up the mizzenpost when they were at sea, and she hadn’t any trouble at all in recognizing the two people who came out the far end of the maze. One of them was precisely whom they’d been discussing: Miss Becky Whitby. The other was someone who was just as easily recognizable, but not because he was wearing a wedding gown.

No, Payton recognized him because she’d been taught all her life to despise and abhor him.

“Georgiana!” Payton cried, jerking her hair from her sister-in-law’s hands. “Look!”

Georgiana let out a yelp. “Payton! Payton, where are you going? Get back in here!”

But Payton was already halfway out the window. Only Georgiana’s firm grasp around her waist—and, if truth be told, the yards and yards of petticoats she wore—kept her from climbing all the way down.

“Georgiana,” she cried, struggling. “Let go! Let go! Don’t you see? Oh!” She realized that only Miss Whitby was in the garden now. Her gentleman escort had disappeared back into the hedge maze. The bride was walking, the light wind picking up her veil and sending it billowing out behind her, quickly back toward the house, looking all about her, as if nervous someone might have seen her secret assignation.

Which, of course, someone had.

“Stop!” Payton yelled. “Becky Whitby! Stop right there!”

While it was true that Payton Dixon had spent a good deal of her life performing labors commonly only practiced by men, and that she was very strong for her sex and size, she was still a good deal smaller than most women. It was for that reason that Georgiana managed to haul her back into the bedroom, using her superior weight as a counterbalance. In fact, she succeeded in sending both of them tumbling backward, and causing them to land in a blizzard of lace-trimmed petticoats and pantaloons.

“Georgiana!” Payton cried furiously, as she tried to scramble back to her feet. “What are you doing? You don’t know what I just saw!”

“No, but I do know you’re acting like an utter lunatic.” Seated on the floor, her legs splayed, Georgiana still managed to keep a firm grip on the back of Payton’s skirt. “You can’t go around climbing out windows, Payton. It isn’t done.”

“I’ll tell you what isn’t done,” Payton began, but before she had a chance, the bedroom door opened, and her eldest brother, Ross, walked in.

Ross looked more than a little surprised at finding his wife and sister sprawled on the floor in a sea of skirts and under-things.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “Am I interrupting something?”

In her shock at being discovered in so ignominious a position by her husband, Georgiana loosened her hold on Payton, who seized the opportunity and headed straight back toward the window. This time, however, it was Ross who stopped her, and he did so by slipping an arm around her waist and lifting her bodily from the windowsill, then striding acrosst he room to deposit her upon the unmade bed, where he held her down quite easily with one hand pressed to the top of her head.

“Ross,” Payton cried indignantly. “Let me up. You don’t understand! You don’t understand what I just saw!”

Georgiana had, by this time, climbed to her feet and brought some order back to her skirts.

“Honestly, Payton,” she scolded. There were bright spots of color on either of her cheeks. She was obviously appalled at having been discovered in so improper a position by her husband, even though Payton had a pretty good idea that her brother and his pretty young wife had been practicing some improper positions of their own the night before. “What could you have been thinking? Ladies don’t go scrambling out windows. They use doors. We’re not on the
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, you know.”

“I wish to hell we were,” Payton said with heartfelt earnestness.

“And ladies don’t curse,” Ross said. He flicked an inquisitive gaze toward his wife. “Do they?”

“Certainly not.” Georgiana shook her head. “Oh, Payton, really. Look at you. I’m going to have to start your hair all over now.”

Payton had had about as much as she could take. “Bugger my hair!” she shouted.

Georgiana gasped, and even Ross looked stern. “Payton,” he began threateningly.

“Now that I’ve got your attention,” Payton said, a little more calmly, “would you please listen to me? This might be somewhat important.”