Mad About the Major (2 page)

“I have heard your praises sung daily since I returned to London,” he was saying.

“You have?” she replied, looking around for her father. This was exactly the sort of thing he was always railing on about—­and she couldn't make up her mind if she wanted his intervention or for the duke to be well out of the way.

“Certainly,” he told her, a slow grin lighting up his smooth, hard lips, while behind his mask, his eyes twinkled with mischief. “And none of the tributes were exaggerated. For even from across the room, your lips drew me closer. And now there is nothing I would love more, my dear milkmaid, than for you to wrap them around my cock tonight, and when you are finished, I promise I shall return the favor and devour the rest of your delicious and notable delights until you can't even remember your name.”

Arabella's mouth fell open.

Had he just said what she thought he'd said?

He wanted her to do what?

Worse, he took her gaping as some sort of acquiescence on her part, or perhaps just an early offer, for he steered her out the open garden doors before she could manage a protest.

She stole a glance up at him and there behind his mask was a smoky light of sensuality—­after four Seasons she wasn't so innocent that she didn't know what
that
meant.

Worse yet, it sent a tremor of desire, a rare curiosity down her limbs. His cock aside, whatever had he meant, that he'd devour her in return?

Just considering the notion sent a delicious shiver down her spine. Especially when she looked at his full, strong lips. Which, she guessed, would be only the beginning of what was strong and firm about him.

Oh, good heavens, she shouldn't even be thinking such things. Considering such notions. Then again, no man, no one, had ever spoken to her thusly.

And Arabella, for the first time in her life, was at a loss as to what to say in return.

While she knew what she should do—­protest loudly and send him off with a sharp, stinging retort—­at that moment, he pulled her close, and the desire in his eyes, a mesmerizing light, left her once again wavering as her world took an unfamiliar tilt.

Not even the realization that she was far deeper in the gardens than she ought to be, or that she was up against him, his arm wound intimately around her waist, gave her the wherewithal to panic properly. For there was one undeniable truth that held her in place.

He was indeed strong. And very firm.

Yet this time when he spoke, it had the opposite effect, his words breaking the passionate spell he'd cast. “My lovely Mrs. Spenser—­”

Mrs. Who?

Then the name came to her.
Mrs. Spenser.
“You cannot think—­”

“Oh, dear Vestal, I can think a lot of things. Like how I've discovered you first. Which I understand has earned me a perfect night.”

“A perfect wha-­a-­at?”

“A perfect night in your bed, isn't that so?” He grinned again, this time wickedly, and much to Arabella's horror, it only made him that much more distracting.

Then, to make matters worse, he began nibbling on her earlobe, whispering a litany of ways he was going to make her night memorable.

“I . . . I . . . I hardly think—­” she stammered to protest. But all too quickly it became clear she wasn't going to be able to think for much longer. Suddenly she was drowning in wave after wave of the most distracting suggestions . . . and sensations.

Oh, heaven help her! Whatever was he doing with his tongue?

Truly, he should cease such improprieties immediately.

Or very soon.

“No, no, you needn't protest,” he whispered, his breath hot and warm in delicious contrast to the cool breeze in the garden. “Perhaps you need references. A hint of what is to come?” His hand slid up from her waist and cupped her breast, his fingers quickly finding her nipple and teasing it into a hard point

“I don't think . . . Oh, my!” she gasped. His touch left her spiraling, falling even as she rose up on her tiptoes. She couldn't help herself. His touch, his lips were heaven, guiding her, pulling her toward something she'd only imagined.

“I promise, I will surprise you,” he whispered in a deep, husky voice.

Arabella blinked and tried to make sense of what was happening. Truly, he needn't promise such a thing. He'd already made good on that pledge.

She was utterly surprised. No, make that shocked.

“All that is left to do is slip off that mask of yours, so I can see the beauty that has all of London in your thrall,” he said, as his fingers reached behind her head to untangle the ties holding it in place. “Tomorrow morning, after I've discovered every delectable, delightful corner of your divine body, will you perhaps tell me what happened to Mr. Spenser?”

Mr. Spenser?
There had been a Mr. Spenser? Arabella couldn't help herself, she smiled. That was quite contradictory to what Lady Davinia had claimed the other day at her mother's afternoon in.

They call themselves Mrs. This or Mrs. That, but there never was a “mister
.”
None whatsoever
, Davinia had told her avid audience. And Lady Davinia would know. Her brother was the worst sort of libertine.

At least that was what Aunt Josephine had said at the breakfast table the next morning. She might have said more on the subject if Papa hadn't
shushed
her.

Mr. Spenser! Oh, wouldn't it be wonderful to steal a march on that gossipy Lady Davinia and tell her there
was
a Mr. Spenser.

Meanwhile, her erstwhile seducer was continuing to outline his plans for their evening, while his fingers did their best to untie her mask.

As he described his sensual ambitions for the hours to come, starting with how he was going to remove her gown, Arabella's eyes widened and her mouth fell open.

Such things were possible? And here she'd always thought that book Thalia Langley had passed around Miss Emery's had been naught but French nonsense.

Yet here was this gentleman offering to do exactly that and more.

More so, from the look in his eye. The odd shiver that ran down her spine all the way to that spot between her legs at the very thought of such intimacy made Arabella realize it must be
very
possible.

And
very
pleasurable.

In that instant, she saw the man before her naked—­well, she could imagine
that
. She had, after all, seen the Elgin Marbles. But now she saw that perfect masculine form in a new light. In the flesh, warm and hot, covering her, his lips caressing her skin, his tongue sliding over her, leaving a heated, wet trail, until he came right down to her . . .

“Oh, my heavens,” she whispered as her body tingled with a dangerous anticipation.

He'd finished untying the knot and was slowly working the strings away from her carefully arranged hairdo. “Come now, Mrs. Spenser, don't be coy with me. However can you blush so—­when I have no doubt you are as eager to see if I can hold up my end of the bargain as I am to prove it.” With that, he caught hold of her hand and was about to place it on his . . .

No, not there. . .

Arabella snatched her fingers back and found her voice. “Sir! What is wrong with you? I am not Mrs. Spenser!”

Even as she said the words, he had succeeded in freeing her mask and it fell away, leaving her face bared for him, her identity his to discover.

Whatever he saw, whatever he'd expected to find, it obviously wasn't she. His eyes widened and then he hastily ripped off his own mask to get a better look. And if the way his expression changed from darkly smoky to shocked was any indication, he had all too quickly realized his mistake.

“Who the devil are you?” His tone overflowed with censure. As if this was entirely her fault.

Arabella's temper rose as quickly as her passions had. “Me? I can tell you who I am not. Some Incognita to be bartered and bandied with.”

His eyes darkened and he looked back over his shoulder toward the ballroom. “That bastard. When I get my hands on him—­”

She caught hold of his sleeve and gave it a tug to regain his attention. “I think you should be apologizing to
me
, not looking for someone else to molest,” she huffed. “Why, of all the common sort of ruffians I've had the misfortune to meet—­”

Truly, she'd never met one, but he didn't know that.

Yet Arabella wasn't done with him. “I suspect even Mrs. Spenser would find you beneath her.”

His wolfish expression returned in a flash. “I had had rather high hopes of finding her just so—­”

Against her better judgment, she silently finished the implication he'd made.

Beneath me.

But it wasn't the courtesan that Arabella saw beneath this man, but herself. Naked and willing. His touch had left her shivering, the brush of his lips leaving her to feel a beggar in his presence.

Take me beneath you
, a very devilish part of her wanted to plead.

Instead, she folded her arms across her chest, tamping her desires back into the confines where they belonged. “You, sir, are most certainly not a gentleman.”

“If I'm not a gentleman, what does that make you? I will point out, you came quite willingly with me. What sort of milkmaid comes out to the gardens when a gentleman asks her to—­?”

“Oh, please do not repeat yourself!” she told him. “Do not ask me such a thing ever again!”

“Oh, please do,” came another voice. A deep and very familiar one. “I would like to know what you asked my daughter to do.”

But her swain had no time to answer, because the Duke of Parkerton followed up his question by spinning the man around, and then landing a hard-­fisted blow that left the devilish fellow in a heap on the ground, out cold.

 

C
HAPTER 2

T
he next morning, Arabella stood by the window in the breakfast room awaiting her reckoning. Papa hadn't said a word the entire way home from the Setchfield ball, which meant the explosion was only a matter of time.

The Duke of Parkerton was known for his reckonings. After all, he'd had years of experience calling to heel his younger brother, Lord John, known throughout the
ton
as “Mad Jack.”

And she had a sense of what this particular reckoning would be. He'd finally have all the ammunition he needed to marry her off to the Duke of Marbury's heir.

All of it for her “own good.”

Behind her, her stepmother, Elinor, and Elinor's young sister, Tia, sat eating their breakfast.

“Come and have a bit of toast, Birdie,” Tia called out, using Arabella's nickname. “Everything is always better with a bit of toast and jam.”

“Yes, please do join us,” Elinor urged her. “Afterward, we are planning a walk in the park with James. You'd like that, wouldn't you?”

She actually would—­she loved her new little brother. The heir that Elinor had provided the Duke of Parkerton within a year of their marriage. No one had been more surprised than the duke himself to become a father again. And if Arabella was to venture a guess, a spare would make an appearance not long after Michaelmas if the bulge in Elinor's usually trim figure was any indication.

Not that Arabella minded in the least seeing her family expand—­especially given her father's happiness in the three years since he'd married Elinor after a madcap and scandalous courtship. Even better, little James's arrival had become the perfect distraction to keep her father from pressing her to marry—­well, that is,
marry well
.

Still, despite Elinor and her sister's friendly pleas, Arabella continued to hold her place by the window. She couldn't eat. Not yet. Not until this reckoning with her father was over. His silence in the carriage home had nearly been her undoing.

Aunt Josephine, who sat in her usual spot at the table, winked at Arabella, and then went back to eating her breakfast. Most likely her elderly relation knew every detail of the night's events.

Then out in the garden, the gate opened and the milkmaid came through, right on schedule, carrying the day's delivery. As always, she arrived whistling a dashing tune, the bright notes carried along on a morning breeze.

Elinor's ever-­present dogs, Fagus and Isadore, sat up and began barking at this intruder, racing in circles around the table and yapping as if the hordes of London had descended on their garden.

While outside, the girl, used to the dogs' ambitious greetings each morning, smiled as if her burdens and their yapping threats were nothing to concern her, and Arabella let out a sigh of envy.

“What is it?” Tia asked, twisting around to look out the window. “Oh, it's her.”

“Every morning she comes through our gate, bringing us those buckets of milk.”

“They look heavy,” Tia said in her very practical way and returned to her breakfast.

“They do indeed,” Arabella agreed, “and yet she smiles and whistles. Whistles!”

Arabella couldn't whistle. Not a note, and a rare whisper of envy moved through her heart.

She wondered if the maid had a fellow who caught her in his arms and whispered into her ear as Arabella's unknown swain had the night before.

Did the maid's knees shiver together at the thought of him touching her as that rogue had promised Arabella last night?

Did the milkmaid let him?

Was it as wickedly wonderful as those brief teasing moments had hinted? Arabella wondered.

“There she is,” Arabella remarked, as the girl came back into view. “She's always as happy as a lark.”

“Perhaps she is happy because her buckets are empty,” Tia pointed out.

“I don't think her burdens weigh all that heavily on her,” Arabella said, unable to keep the wistful note out of her words.

“I think you spend far too much time looking out the window,” Tia remarked as she plucked another piece of toast from the rack.

“That's it exactly!” Arabella said, leaving the window and coming to a stop behind her chair. Her chair. The one she always sat in. Everything about her life was like that. The same routine, the same ­people, the very same entertainments day after day, year after year, and she, Lady Arabella Tremont, was miserable. Out in the garden, the gate was swinging shut. “She wears the same dress—­homespun, I imagine—­and the same shabby boots, and yet she's happy.” She glanced at Tia and Elinor. “Happy! How is that?”

“I don't know,” Elinor said, smiling up at her. She looked ready to say more, but someone else joined the conversation.

“Perhaps she's content with her lot in life.” This came from the doorway and they all turned to find the duke standing there. He paused for only a moment and then came in, first placing a gentle, lingering kiss upon his wife's forehead, and then taking his place at the head of the table. “Your milkmaid is content because she knows her place.”

Arabella shook her head. “No, Papa. She's happy because she's free.”

“Freedom is a rare commodity for a lady,” Elinor remarked.

“If I were free for just one day—­” Arabella began.

“You? Free?” Her father began to laugh. “If you were set free you'd be in the suds before you crossed the street.” He shook out his napkin. “You, free! What utter nonsense.”

“James—­” Elinor began, but was cut off by her husband.

“Arabella Tremont,” the duke said, having warmed to his subject and still furious from the night before, “you have more freedom than any milkmaid. You want for nothing and yet all you want is more.”

“I never asked for any of this,” she shot back, waving her hand at the gilt room and the overladen sideboard, as if it was all a burden to be borne, heavier and more unwieldy than the milkmaid's buckets.

“No one does,” he told her. “That is why it is called ‘your lot in life.' And you had best wed yourself to the notion that your lot doesn't involve dashing about alleyways like a common milkmaid, nor does it involve kissing every scalawag and bit of riffraff who comes along.”

“He kissed you?” Tia exclaimed, eyes wide with shock.

“He kissed you?!” Aunt Josephine said, but her statement rang with surprise and delight. Suddenly, she perked up and grinned at the Arabella, eagerly awaiting the details.

Oh, bother, this was Aunt Josephine. She'd demand the details.

“Certainly not!” she shot back—­for all their sakes—­even as the color rose on her cheeks to be reminded of what had transpired. “He didn't kiss me.”

If one didn't count what he'd done to the spot behind her ear. She'd lain awake a good part of the night caught in memory of that delicious moment.

Yet he hadn't kissed her. Much to Arabella's chagrin. But he'd done enough that she'd discovered a different kind of freedom.

In his touch. In the way he'd teased her into a breathless state.

Awakened her.

Without even kissing her.

“That's rather disappointing,” Aunt Josephine declared, and went back to her breakfast.

The duke shot his great-­aunt a scathing glance—­which was a complete waste of time, for nothing and no one had ever managed to quell Lady Josephine Tremont. After a moment, he turned his wrath back on his rebellious daughter. “The only reason you aren't ruined and the headline of every gossip column in London is because I found you in time.”

“Gossip columns!” Arabella scoffed. “You've always told me to ignore their prattle. As it is, I've never read them, and expect nor does anyone who is of consequence or good manners.”

At this, Aunt Josephine snapped her paper shut and set it aside, taking a renewed interest in her breakfast.

“Good manners, indeed!” The duke followed this pronouncement with a loud
harrumph
. “Being free with your manners is how that devil managed to get you out into that garden in the first place.”

“You went out in the garden with him?” Now Tia was shocked. Then again, she was newly returned from Miss Emery's School in Bath and had graduated with a very strict sense of what a lady did and what a lady
never
did.

Lessons Arabella had missed because she'd been thrown out after only a year.

For kissing the stable hand . . .

Not that she'd had a chance to kiss anyone else since.

Her father had seen to that.

Still, looking from her father's outraged expression to Tia's one of horror, Arabella knew she needed to explain. “He took me outside because he thought I was—­”

She stopped herself right there. Telling her father that this rogue had mistaken her for one of London's most infamous courtesans would hardly be a point in her favor.

He probably wouldn't let her out of the house for the rest of the Season.

Nor was the duke about to let her lapse lay fallow. “Who did he think you were?”

She wasn't a Tremont for nothing. Arabella stood her ground and refused to yield.

Or rather, condemn herself.

“He thought I was someone else,” she said, chin tucked up defiantly. “And I wish I was.” With that, she got up and fled.

Because more humiliating than having her father give an accounting of her scandalous evening was the memory of it.

Oh, bother! Arabella wished that rogue had kissed her. Just once. Maybe twice.

Wished with all her heart, her unknown seducer had given her the taste of freedom she so craved. Desired with all her heart.

And now, would never know.

“S
he is just like her mother,” James Lambert St. Maur Thurstan Tremont, the ninth Duke of Parkerton, told his wife an hour later when Elinor joined him in his study.

Elinor said nothing and sat down in the chair near the fireplace. She nodded toward the one opposite hers.

Parkerton rose from his desk and joined her, though he preferred to hold such discussions with the wide expense of his imposing desk before him like a stern buffer. For years it had been his brother, Jack, standing across from him and enduring another lecture. Now it seemed all his “discussions” were about Arabella.

“She is going to that house party,” he said, knowing he sounded like a stubborn old mule. But he saw no other way to keep his daughter from making a disastrous mistake.

“Wasn't her mother forced to marry a man she didn't love?” Elinor pointed out in that quiet, yet firm way of hers.

Parkerton pressed his lips together and shifted in his chair. Damn his wife and her penchant for pointing out the obvious.

Which he also supposed was why he'd fallen in love with her.

Nor was Elinor done. “And when you discovered your wife had loved another, hadn't wanted to marry you, how did that make you feel? I know how I felt when I was forced to wed a man I didn't love.”

He glanced away for he didn't want to answer that. And demmit if Elinor wasn't right most of the time. Oh, bother, demmed near always.

“Whyever do you want to consign Arabella to the same fate?” his wife pressed. That they had both had terrible first marriages, and yet been able to overcome all that grief and find each other, was something of a miracle to them both.

Since it was no comfort to Parkerton that he wasn't going to win the day by forcing Arabella, he changed course a bit. “She refuses to even meet Marbury's heir. She is being overly stubborn and willful.”

He did his best to ignore how stubborn and willful his declaration sounded.

Elinor didn't. “Do you blame her? What with you and his father pushing for this match with every breath. It is a wonder she and Somersale haven't conspired together to have you both tossed in the Thames.”

“She merely has to meet the fellow,” Parkerton asserted, ignoring his own stubbornly held desires.

Elinor wasn't about to ignore them. She threw up her hands and chided him. “You'll push her too far and she'll make some disastrous choice.”

He shook his head. “Her mother didn't. She knew her duty. Her lot in life.”

“Her mother may have been resigned to her ‘lot in life,' as you call it, but Arabella is half Tremont.” Elinor's brow arched upward and she needn't say any more.

After all, that half is what kept Parkerton awake most nights in a dead panic.

A
sennight later, Arabella followed her father down the front steps of the house, as if being led toward her own hanging. The staff, all lined up as they always were when her father departed, watched the proceedings with woeful expressions.

The invitation to the Duke of Marbury's house party had been accepted and she was being led off to meet and consent to a suitable marriage partner.

No more strangers in the gardens for Arabella. No more suitors. No more whispered promises in the moonlight.

She was to be wed, and that was the end of the matter.

Near the front of the line, their faithful and beloved housekeeper burst into tears. “The poor little lamb,” she managed through the sobs before she pressed her apron to her face.

Arabella rushed forward and gave her a hug. “There, there, Mrs. Oxton, it isn't like I won't be coming home.”

Hopefully she'd get a chance to come home before . . . Before she was married off to Marbury's heir like a prized filly, all bloodlines and proper matches and not a single consideration of love or passion.

Decidedly not passion.

Now it was Arabella's turn to give a bit of a sniff. It wasn't really like she was crying, not until she glanced over at their butler.

Even Cantley, dear, dour Cantley, looked ready to dash aside a sheen of moisture in his eyes. “My lady, sweet Birdie, be brave,” he said quietly.

Arabella felt the depths of her mortification run all the way down to the tips of her traveling boots and then turned her gaze toward the single person responsible: her father.