I Adored a Lord (5 page)

She hadn't.

She had
. In fear, of course.

Fear or not, his mouth was perfect, both at rest and grinning and marked with a purple wound. And he knew it.

“My lord,” Lady Grace said sweetly. “You mustn't fault Miss Caulfield for misunderstanding the ways of gentlemen. Her father is a country vicar. It is not to be wondered at that he could know nothing of noble resolve.” The very breath that issued from her lips condescended.

“Ah, but the church is the noblest of professions, my lady,” Lord Vitor replied, and reached for two more glasses on the waiting footman's tray. He extended one to Lady Penelope. “Miss Caulfield, what admirable moral guidance you must have enjoyed in your impressionable youth—­”

The footman pitched forward abruptly, the tray jerked, and the remaining glass of champagne splattered over Lady Grace.

She gasped. The footman grabbed the glass. Lord Vitor took the tilted tray from his grip and set it down. Ravenna stared, but not at Lady Grace. The dent in his cheek had deepened.

Fury lit Lady Grace's eyes upon the footman. “You—­”

“I fear, my lady,” Lord Vitor said, “that the fault is not this poor fellow's, but mine.”

“
Mais
—­ monseigneur
—­
” the footman sputtered.

“No, no, my good man. I won't have you taking the blame for it. This dratted injury to my leg caused it to spasm momentarily. I kicked you and I am terribly sorry to have made you trip.” He turned to Lady Grace and bowed. “I am devastated, my lady. Can you ever forgive me?”

She opened her lips and after a moment's silence said, “Of course I shall, my lord.”

Lady Whitebarrow appeared between Ravenna and Miss Feathers. “My dear Grace, whatever has happened?” she said coolly. “Come. They will hold dinner while you change. Do not fret. We will demand that his highness remove that footman from ser­vice immediately.”

Lady Penelope set her hand atop her mother's. “That will not be necessary, Mama. Grace will be all right as soon as she changes her gown.” Her gaze slid to Ravenna, and the blue of her pale eyes grew diamond hard. “No one is at fault.”

Ravenna returned her stare. While innocent Ann Feathers would not understand what had just occurred, Lady Penelope most certainly did. It might have been the nobleman who enacted the insult, but Ravenna would pay for it.

This time, however, there was no bird, no chicks, nothing with which they could hurt her. There was only she, alone yet capable of defending herself even from an attacker in the dark. She could manage two spiteful girls well enough. She could even wrest justice from an arrogant lord too.

 

Chapter 4

The Knight

V
itor had already reached the base of the stairs to the upper quarters when he heard her footsteps, light and far too quick for a lady, coming after him. He lengthened his pace, and she hastened hers.

“Wait, would you!” she shouted up to him.

It could not be avoided. Hand on the rail, he paused on the uppermost step and turned, squelching a grimace from the pain in his leg. Like a dark, homespun fury, she ascended.

“Miss Caulfield,” he could only think to say. As in the stable, then again in the drawing room, he felt the most insistent urge to grab her about the waist and kiss her. It was instinctual and animal and thoroughly ignoble and certainly a product of two years of enforced celibacy. It left him tongue-­tied.

She came to a halt on the step beside him. “Well?” Cheeks flushed lightly pink and eyes sparkling like stars at midnight, she looked directly at him. There was no coquettishness about this girl, no maidenly reticence or superficial niceness, rather, all justified indignation that made her astoundingly pretty. “Well?” she repeated.

With some effort he unwound his tongue. “I am emboldened by your eloquence, Miss Caulfield, to suggest that you are perhaps as weary as I at the end of this long day—­after a rather uncomfortable night, although perhaps not quite as uncomfortable for you as it was for me.” He allowed himself the slightest smile. “I advise you to continue on to your quarters for a good sleep as I intend to do.”

“Oh!” she said brightly. “Such a wit! I am transported.” With a swift perusal of his coat, waistcoat, trousers, and boots—­first down, then up—­that rendered the tension in his abdomen into an aggressive pressure, she took the final step to the landing above. Her starlight eyes came to his level.
Not good
.

“You tackled me, then you kissed me,” she said.

“And you hit me with a door and then a pitchfork and bit me. It seems we are both outrageously
outrés
.”

“Perhaps,” she conceded with a twist of soft, full lips the color of summer dusk over the Mediterranean. “But you actually deserved it.”

“I don't know what came over me.” Celibacy. Two long years of celibacy. And ripe lips. Dusky, tempting lips an inch beneath his. And a soft, curved body, also beneath him. Tonight her curves were concealed by yet another gown of plain fabric and ser­viceable shape, and yet still he could not look away. He didn't know what sins he had done to deserve this torment, but whatever it was he was willing to do a thousand novenas to escape speaking with her in private ever again.

She set her hands on her hips, emphasizing their decadent curve. Never mind her homespun gown and unkempt hair, she made his breaths short.

“You kissed me because you thought I was a servant, which is despicable.”

“I kissed you because you were soft and shapely and at the time under me, which is in fact quite reasonable.”

“I did not exactly put myself there.”

“And I did not exactly plan on being attacked by a feral cat in the dark. It was a mistake. Good night, Miss Caulfield.” He continued onto the landing and swiftly down the long, high gallery that his blood-­grandfather had constructed to display the family's vast collection of medieval armor. To either side, his forebears had arranged suits of steel, some of plain, pounded metal, others elaborately painted and embossed.

“Is that all I am to have?” She followed him. “I suppose you consider an apology beneath you.”

Rather, he was considering her beneath him, how good she'd felt there, and how he would like that again. He halted. “Madam, I offer my profoundest apology. It shan't happen again.” As though his feet moved of their own will, he found himself stepping toward her. “Unless you wish it to.”

She backed up. “Not in this life.” But her eyes were wary.

Good
. He did not wish to frighten her. But keeping her wary could work. And yet the most powerful need to be near her would not leave him.
Of course it wouldn't
. After two long years he wanted a woman. Among his brother's potential brides was not, however, the place to go searching for one.

“That must be to my advantage, then,” he said.

She screwed up her brow. “Must it?”

“You wield an impressive pitchfork.”

“I know how to use the tines too.” A smile played about her lips, a reluctant smile that begged a man to set his lips to it and tease it into fullness.

Oh,
no
.

“I do not doubt it,” he said, backing away. “And I will hold you to that should I decide I need assistance in hastening my end.” Turning away from the temptress, he started along the corridor again. But . . . he had to know. He looked over his shoulder. “How did you know what colhões meant?”

“I guessed.”

“You guessed?”

“I spend a lot of time with stable hands and farmers. Now, what about the other apology you owe me?”

Looking into her upturned face, he wished he had a list of sins for which he must apologize. Last night, if he'd had his wits about him, he might not have returned her attack. Instead he might have seduced slowly, carefully, and succeeded. He might have enticed her to him, tempting her to touch him voluntarily. Then, in the dark he might have allowed his hands to explore those hips and that waist, to smooth up to her breasts, round and young and the perfect size for a man's hands, to press her knees apart and—­

No
.

He shook his head. “I did nothing else to you.”
Deeply regrettable
.

“Not
that
. What about Lady Grace in the drawing room?”

Ah. The champagne rescue. Cats like Whitebarrow's daughters needed to be served occasional doses of humility. It was good for their souls. “Don't thank me.” He waved it off. “I did nothing.”

“You made it worse.”

“What?”

“They are furious with me for having witnessed Lady Grace's embarrassment.”

“But they ceased insulting you, didn't they?”

A mulish frown marred her brow. “I can defend myself.”

“You were clearly doing a spectacular job of it.”

Ravenna stared into eyes the color of midnight and did not like it that laughter and warmth lurked there. This handsome, virile nobleman could know nothing of her daily struggle not to tell girls like Penelope and Grace exactly what she thought of them. Standing here with a sapphire nestled in his snowy, starched cravat and aristocratic blood stamped all over his face, he couldn't understand anything worthwhile. But nothing came to her tongue. The crease teasing at his left cheek muddled her head, just as his lips upon hers had.

“Mm hm,” he murmured, his midnight eyes intent. “I thought so. Good night, Miss Caulfield. Pleasant dreams plotting your revenge.” He bowed. His gait as he walked away was not entirely even. He favored his left leg, the leg she'd hit with the pitchfork.

Guilt and some confusion tangled in her belly. “I absolutely will not dream of you, even to plan revenge,” she said to his back.

Over his shoulder he turned a smile upon her that sent her breath into her toes. For a moment, almost, his smile seemed regretful. “I was referring to your revenge upon Ladies Penelope and Grace, of course,” he said.

An alien sensation swept into her face. She touched her cheek. It was hot.
Hot?

At a slow pace he returned to her. His smile had vanished. He halted before her and bowed again, this time soberly.

“Miss Caulfield, I beg your forgiveness.” His voice was low and his gaze seemed to seek hers quite closely. “I intended you no harm, in truth. Still, I was unpardonably dishonorable to assail you and then tease you and then rescue you and then tease you yet again. Can you forgive me, or will those eyes like stars stare with accusation at me throughout the remaining weeks of this fete?”

Eyes like stars?
It was a very good thing she didn't regularly consort with lords. Their rote flatteries were positively inane. “You are still teasing. And you ask my forgiveness in the same words you asked Lady Grace's.”

“But in this instance I am most sincere.”

“I am not in the habit of forgiving.”

“Perhaps you might make an exception this time.”

“I don't know why I should.”

“Consider my injuries.” The dent deepened anew. “Perhaps I am already sufficiently punished.”

She tried not to smile. “I won't apologize for that.”

“I never expected you to. Now may we put this unfortunate episode behind us and instead pretend to be two ­people who happened to become acquainted over spilled champagne?”

“Why should we pretend that?”

“It's either that or the pitchfork.” His dark eyes glimmered.

“All right. But don't do it again.”

“Kiss you in a stable or defend you from tabbies?”

The heat was back in her face. “Either.”

“I believe I can promise that.” He bowed again. “Good night, madam.” He walked away.

Ravenna stared at his back but her cheeks still burned. She dragged her attention to the floor. Nothing there could make her feel peculiarly hot or unsteady as his shoulders and dark hair and the muscular lengths of his legs did.

Where her gaze alit, a blot of dark liquid pooled about the pointed toe of a suit of armor. She crouched and studied the leak. It was not black but dark crimson and congealed. Blood. Undeniably, blood. Far too much blood for a mouse that might have gotten trapped in the armored foot, or even a cat. She sniffed. The scent that came to her was ripe like animal death yet unfamiliar, an odd oniony morbidity. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled.

She stood and peered at the suit's visor. The steel looked impenetrable, with a tiny slit over the eyes that was lost in shadow now, one of those old helmets from which she could not imagine how a knight would be able to see. She reached up and pried open the visor.

She jolted back. The visor clanked shut. But she'd seen enough to make her hot skin turn clammy.

“A student of medieval arms, are you, Miss Caulfield?” Lord Vitor's voice echoed from the opposite end of the gallery. “And here I'd thought you preferred farm tools.”

“There is a dead man inside this suit.”

He moved to her quite swiftly, no evidence of the injury she'd dealt him now in his gait.

“I saw the blood on the floor from the foot,” she said as he came beside her. He lifted the visor, then lowered it and looked down at her. His sapphire eyes were no longer warm and laughing.

“I pray you, go now, Miss Caulfield,” he said.

“No.”

“Go now.”

“Why?”

“Go. A lady should not see this.”

“I'm not a lady. And I have seen dead bodies before.” That made her stomach tight. Beast's grave was the freshest. She had laid him atop his favorite old blanket and wrapped the wool about him, then she had watered the dirt with her tears.

“Go.”

“I wonder who he is. That gold tooth wasn't come by cheaply, so he's certainly not a servant.”

“He was a man of more vanity than means.”

She looked away from the corpse to the nobleman beside her and her stomach did a little jerk. He was so alive. It struck her as odd that she would think this, that she would notice a man's aliveness. She had never done so before, even when confronted by death. But there was a depth of warm vitality to Lord Vitor Courtenay that shone in his eyes and the manner in which he stood with easy confidence.

“How do you know that?” she said.

“His name is Oliver Walsh. I have known him many years but I did not know he was to be a guest here.”

“Oh. I'm sorry.” She looked at the suit of armor again. “I suppose he became trapped in there and suffocated, though of course that wouldn't explain the blood. We must—­”

Lord Vitor grasped her arm. “Miss Caulfield, will you retire now? I will send the housekeeper to see to your comfort.”

She pulled free. “I don't need comforting. I told you—­”

“Woman, do as I say,” he growled.

“Ah, we've returned to the stable, have we?”

A muscle in his jaw flexed. “Miss Caulfield—­”

“You don't think he suffocated. You think someone murdered him, then stuffed him in this suit.”

He shook his head. “You are the most peculiar lady I have ever encountered.”

“I have already told you, I am not a lady. Let me help.”

“Help?”

“Help you remove this suit and examine him.”

“No.”

“I am quite good at this sort of thing.”

“No.”

“I have considerable experience caring for both animals and humans.”

“Live humans, presumably?”

“Usually, but not exclusively. Three months ago I solved the mysterious death of the butcher in the local village.”