Captain Rakehell (4 page)

“Your friend Smythe hit him and he fell against the tree,” Amanda replied, chafing one of Andrew’s limp hands between her own.

“I know no one named Smythe, my lady.”

“Oh, of course not,” she retorted, eyeing him sharply over her brother’s slumped form.

If indeed he was her brother, which the captain doubted. He’d cajoled more than one young lady into a dark garden himself, but never his sister. He’d never had a sister, but that fact made her explanation no less suspicious, perhaps because he wished he’d been the one to lure her into the darkness.

“And I don’t suppose,” Amanda went on, “you know anyone named Jack or Harry, do you?”

“As a matter of fact, my lady, I do not.”

She made a derisive noise in her throat, which turned into a cough as a particularly acrid puff of smoke from the smoldering leaves billowed around them. Tears welled in her eyes, and the man under the tree stirred again and coughed.

“We should remove your—er, brother,” Earnshaw said, leaning over Andrew to pick him up. “This smoke can’t be doing him any good. Or you either, my lady.”

“No!” Amanda cried, just as there came the faint shout of “Fire! Fire!” from the house.

Probably one of the footmen, Earnshaw thought, casting a look over his shoulder at the thick curtain of smoke drifting across the garden, and then at Amanda as he felt her hands close around his wrists. Her fingers were cold and trembling.

“You must go,” she said urgently, glancing around frantically as she drew him to his feet. “Oh, where in blazes is your horse?”

“Halfway home by now, I’m sure,” the captain replied, grinning at her curse.

“Then you must flee on foot,” Amanda said, and began dragging him toward the wall. “Someone will be coming from the house any moment now!”

“But, my lady, there’s no need—”

“Are you insane?” she cried, whirling to face him on the lip of the slope. “How can you possibly explain your presence here? You are not one of the duchess’s guests!”

She was wrong about that, but right about explaining his presence, not to mention her own. Obviously, she had yet to think of that, but he had.

“And how will my lady explain herself?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll—I’ll think of something. Now go!”

Goaded by the clatter of footsteps on the terrace, and deciding he had enough to explain to his mother as it was, Earnshaw nodded and started for the wall. If the man under the tree was in fact her brother she’d be safe enough; if he wasn’t, she’d have the devil’s own time explaining herself without his presence to further complicate her predicament. He’d only taken two steps, however, when he felt a tug on his sleeve and turned back to Amanda.

“So your evening’s work will not be a total waste,” she said, plucking her pearl earrings from her ears and holding them out to him.

“Keep your ear bobs, my lady,” Earnshaw replied, taking a step toward her. “I’ll take this instead.”

Gripping her small shoulders between his hands, he kissed her, very quickly but very thoroughly.  And then he vaulted over the wall in the darkness.

Chapter Four

The swoon Amanda decided it was best to fall into to avoid lengthy and sticky explanations was only partially feigned. She had been kissed before, but not on the lips, never in such a shockingly familiar manner—and never by a thief.

Her mother, however, swooned so often that Amanda was able to maintain her ruse despite the heap of burgundy satin the Countess Hampton collapsed into when her father carried her through the French doors into the ballroom. The only thing that threatened to start her giggling and give her away was the Duchess of Braxton’s exasperated cry, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Cornelia, not now!”

Once past that rough patch, however, Amanda was able to keep her eyes closed and lie limply on a settee in a downstairs saloon while the duchess dispatched a maid for the smelling salts, directed the footman carrying her mother to another settee, and Lord Hampton questioned a still groggy and mortified Andrew about Jack and Harry and Smythe. They were much too busy to notice the soft smile on her face or the fingertips she raised to trace her lips.

Her pretense held beautifully until her mother was revived and threw herself into the arms of the duchess, her lifelong friend, who sat beside her on the settee.

“Oh, Eugenia!” She sobbed. “Amanda is ruined! And all our wonderful plans for her future and Lesley’s are dashed!”

“Hardly, Cornelia,” the duchess soothed patiently, as she patted her on the back. “Swooning in a garden and muddying one’s dress never ruined anyone.”

“But you don’t understand!” the Countess wailed tearfully. “That old dragon Matilda Blumfield noticed Amanda’s absence, and while you and Andrew and dear Hampton were searching for her she demanded to know her whereabouts! She was so dreadful, and I was so frightened she’d bruit it about that Amanda had taken herself off right under my nose that I told her she’d taken a megrim and I’d sent her home with Andrew! And then—” Lady Hampton paused to sniffle and hiccup— “there she was, standing right by the terrace doors when dear Hampton carried her inside and—”

“Mama, how could you!” Amanda cried, shooting upright on the settee. “I’ve never had a megrim in my life!”

“And apparently, my gel,” the duchess said with a dubiously arched eyebrow, as the countess swooned again and she lifted one of her limp hands and began to chafe it, “you’ve never swooned, either.”

“But I did, Your Grace,” Amanda insisted, crossing the fingers of one hand behind her back. “Truly.”

The Duchess of Braxton’s eyebrow slid up another doubtful notch. Her Grace, whose temper was nearly as formidable as her poise, could quite justifiably hold her at least partially responsible for making a shambles of the ball. Her green eyes were already beginning to smolder, but it occurred to Amanda suddenly that she could use the duchess’s anger to her advantage.

“I did try not to,” she went on earnestly, “but I don’t think any young lady of sensibility would have been able not to swoon after such a kiss.”

“Kiss!” Lord Hampton roared, abandoning his interrogation of Andrew to grasp her by the shoulders. “Which of those vile thieves dared touch you?”

Amanda had meant to infuriate the duchess, not her father, whose temperate nature was as remarked upon as her mother’s swooning spells. Dumbstruck by his passionate and uncharacteristic response, she could do nothing but gape at him until Andrew appeared at his side.

“It was Smythe, wasn’t it?” her brother demanded.

“Heaven’s no!” She cried then, her nose wrinkling in revulsion. “It was the gentleman in the black mask!”

“What gentleman in the black mask?” Lord Hampton bellowed, letting go of Amanda and wheeling on Andrew. “And where were you while some blackguard was having his way with your sister?”

‘‘But, sir, I——’’

“Say nothing.” Lord Hampton held up a shaky hand, as much to control himself, thought Amanda, as to silence her brother. “I apologize for my outburst, Eugenia. We will continue this—er—discussion at home.”

Frowning at Andrew, he strode across the room, opened the door—and caught the Baroness Matilda Blumfield, the most notorious gossip among the beau monde, as she all but fell into the room. The duchess gave an indignant cry, but Amanda groaned, covered her face with her hands, and thanked God her mother had already fainted.

“If I were you, Hampton,” said the short, squat baroness, as she quickly recovered her balance and her aplomb, “I’d thrash the two of them within an inch of their lives.”

“Perhaps, madam,” Lord Hampton retorted frostily, “Blumfield should do the same to you.”

“We-e-e-ll!”
the baroness gasped, every inch of her plump figure going stiff with outrage. “I have never—”

“Your pardon, Your Grace,” the butler said, appearing in the doorway behind the baroness. “A Mr. Fisk from Bow Street is waiting to see you in the library.”

“Assure him nothing was stolen, Denham,” replied the duchess, who was glaring at the baroness and still holding Lady Hampton’s hand, “and ask him to come back tomorrow.”

“Your Grace.” The butler paused and cleared his throat. “He has Master Theodore with him.”

“What?” She shrieked, leaping so suddenly to her feet that she nearly jerked the countess off the settee. “Oh, Lud, what now!”

Dropping her friend’s hand, she rushed out of the room behind Denham with the Baroness Blumfield, her beady little eyes agleam, on her heels. Lord Hampton started after them, but wheeled back to glare at his children.

“Summon the carriage, Andrew, and take your mother and sister home. I shall remain here to see if I can be assistance to Her Grace and Theodore. I will see the both of you in my study tomorrow morning, however, at ten o’clock promptly.”

“Yes, sir,” they replied in unison.

As the saloon door closed behind him, Armanda lowered her hands and turned a wide-eyed gaze on her brother. “I’ve really put us in the sauce this time, haven’t I?”

“That you have,” he agreed sourly, “and Father is going to baste us in it at ten o’clock tomorrow morning promptly. Whatever possessed you to tell such a wild tale?”

“It isn’t a tale,” Amanda retorted hotly. “There was a gentleman in a black mask, and he did kiss me!”

“I saw no such person,” Andrew replied with a raised eyebrow. “There was only Jack and Harry and Smythe.”

“Of course you didn’t see him!” Amanda sprang angrily to her feet. “You’d already hit your head and fallen unconscious when he jumped his horse over the garden wall!”

“There was no horse, either,” Andrew pointed out, his eyebrow sliding further up his forehead.

“He bolted when I jumped out of the tree!”

“And threw his rider, I suppose.”

“No, I knocked him out of his saddle as I fell.”

“For which, I’m sure, he was so grateful he kissed you.”

“No! I offered him my earrings, but he took a kiss instead.”

“Thank God you didn’t tell Father that!”

“I didn’t intend to tell Papa anything. I meant only to incite the duchess and make her think twice of marrying me off to Captain Earnshaw.”

“Well, you botched it,” Andrew stated flatly. “And if you’ve any sense at all, you’ll confess to Father you made the whole thing up.”

“But I didn’t!”

Andrew said nothing, just raised his other eyebrow, and left the saloon to call for their carriage.

He doesn’t believe me, Amanda realized, and fell back onto the settee in a daze. She tried again in the carriage on their way home to convince him, but he remained unmoved. She was so upset by his mulishness, that it didn’t occur to her until she’d bathed, washed the leaves and twigs out of her hair, and sat down on the hearth rug before the fire in her room to brush it dry that her purpose would be as well served if no one—especially the Duchess of Braxton—believed her story of the man in the black mask.

As Andrew had pointed out, there was no physical evidence whatsoever to prove he’d been in the garden. Perhaps Her Grace would also think she’d made him up. Or even better, that she’d imagined him, that she was given to hysterics, that she was a goosecap, a bacon brain, and wholly unsuited to being her daughter-in-law.

And perhaps she was, Amanda reflected pensively, as she put her brush away and got into bed. How could she have let—no, helped—the man in the black mask escape? Where had her determination to capture the thieves vanished to? Why had it vanished? She certainly hadn’t been overcome by his handsomeness because it had been dark and his mask had covered his nose and cheekbones and most of his forehead. The only one of his features she could clearly recall was his mouth; and not the shape of it so much as the feel of it.

She could feel his lips still, Amanda thought, if she concentrated hard enough, but she wasn’t at all sure she ought to. The depth and intensity of the sensations that had jolted through her when he’d kissed her had both thrilled and shaken her. Nothing Andrew had told her about the ways of men and women had prepared her for it. She very much wanted to talk to her brother about it, but how could she when he didn’t believe her?

Truth or fabrication would be of no concern to the Baroness Blumfield, however. The shocking story of Lady Amanda Gilbertson being kissed by a man in a black mask under the beech tree in the Duchess of Braxton’s garden would be all over London by tomorrow’s luncheon. But mightn’t that, too, work to her advantage? If she were disgraced—and knowing the baroness’s love of embellishment, Amanda had every reason to believe she would be—her Grace would be forced to renege!

She might very well be banished to Hampton Hall for the rest of her life, but anything, Amanda told herself, even ruination and virtual imprisonment, would be preferable to marrying Lesley Earnshaw. Content that she’d managed to save herself from a fate worse than death (not quite the way she’d planned but saved nonetheless), she fell asleep with a smile on her face and her fingertips curled against her lower lip.

Her euphoria faded, however, when a footman ushered her and Andrew into their father’s study at ten o’clock the next morning. Looking harried and angry, and very, very determined, Lord Hampton rose behind his desk.

“Sit,” he commanded, indicating the two chairs set before him. Once they’d done so, he folded his hands behind him and began. “Your mother and Her Grace are, even as we speak, paying a call on the Baroness Blumfield. They hope to dissuade her from repeating your ridiculous story of the gentleman in the black mask.”

“It’s not a ridiculous story, Papa,” Amanda replied. “It’s the truth.”

Lord Hampton glanced at Andrew.

“I saw no such person, sir,” he said, shifting uncomfortably in his chair.

“Andy didn’t see him,” Amanda explained, “because he was unconscious when the man in the mask jumped his horse over the garden wall. I thought he was a thief, in league with Jack and Harry and Smythe, but when I knocked him out of his saddle he begged my pardon and—”

“When you what?” Lord Hampton’s eyebrows shot up his forehead and all but disappeared into his graying fair hair.

“When I jumped out of the beech tree,” Amanda continued. “I meant to land on Smythe, who was about to make off with the duchess’s belongings. I couldn’t allow that, of course, so I—”