Margaret Moore (5 page)

“Exactly. You could very well take my inheritance,” he noted, glancing over his cup at Cheddersby.

Then Neville’s expression changed as he turned to regard his other friend, who desperately wanted to buy back his family’s estate. “Or you, Richard.”

“You would be certain of a cottage on my land if I did,” Richard replied, which was not at all what Neville wanted to hear.

“Richard, you wouldn’t!” Foz gasped.

“Maybe he should,” Neville replied, once again assuming a mask of light frivolity that was a distinct contrast to his true feelings.
“I’faith, if I am to be replaced like a broken wheel or sick horse, I would far rather have the money go to someone I know than a stranger.”

“You are no worse than any other man,” Foz offered comfortingly.

Which reminded Neville of his father’s admonition that if he was no worse, he was no better, either.

“I doubt there is a man in England capable of meeting my father’s expectations,” he muttered in his own defense.

Richard put his hand on Neville’s shoulder in a rare gesture of sympathy. “He will see your merit one day.”

Neville shrugged off Richard’s hand. He wished he had kept silent about his father’s intentions. Richard was a handsome fellow, and while his manner could be brusque in the extreme, Neville had noticed that many women found the bitter, sardonic cavalier fascinating.

Fortunately, another thought brought comfort and not a little relief: his father would surely never permit his ward to marry a playwright.

Restored to his usual jocund humor, Neville said, “I fear either he or I will expire before he sees me as anything but a complete waste of life and breath.”

“Well, whatever you require, you know you have but to ask,” Foz replied sympathetically.

“And you must share my lodgings,” Richard added.

“Thank you, my friends, but he has not yet thrown me into the streets. It is a comfort to know I shall not starve if he does.” Then he grinned. “I tell you, if my father is not proof against beauty, it should be a warning to us all. Anyone might lose their head over a woman.”

Foz nodded solemnly. “It is a sad thing when one’s father loses his head.”

“As I’m sure the king would attest,” Richard agreed.

“I never meant anything of that sort!”

“A witty sally, though,” Neville said, smiling at poor Foz, whose greatest desire was to be accounted a wit.

“Oh, I say, it was, wasn’t it?” Foz replied, his thin chest puffed with pride. “What do you intend to do?”

“Do?”

“Yes. About
her.
”

Neville felt as if somebody had upset a bucket of slops on his head. Why, of course he must do something. He could not sit idly by while his hard-won fortune went to another. And that it should be Foz who reminded him of this duty … Well, his wits must have truly been addled with shock. Or arousal. “I shall have to show him that he is making a serious mistake.”

“Will you challenge him to a duel?”

“He
is
my father, Foz. No matter how he infuriates me, I do not think killing him would be the best solution.”

“Then what?” Richard demanded. “What will you do?”

Neville’s eyes gleamed with the devilment his friends knew so well. “I shall simply have to prove that Lady Arabella is not as virtuous as he thinks.”

Foz looked confused. “How are you going to do that?”

“I shall prove that no one, not even such a paragon, is without fault,” Neville replied with a beatific smile, “by seducing her.”

And given that kiss, the seduction of Arabella struck him as a most delightful challenge.

“I thought you said she wasn’t very pretty,” Foz countered dubiously.

“My dear Foz,” Neville said with an air of superior wisdom, “she is a woman. That is all that is important to know when my inheritance is at stake.”

Besides, if that one kiss was a basis for judgment, she would be worth the pursuit, no matter who she was.

“A very noble sacrifice, my lord,” Richard observed sarcastically. “What will you do if you discover she
is
virtuous, and so fail?”

“Can this be Sir Richard Blythe speaking?” Neville demanded of Foz. “Is Sir Richard
Blythe not normally the most cynical of mortals, especially where the fair sex is concerned?” He turned an inquiring eye onto Richard. “Or is it that you would rather attempt the seduction?”

“Oh, not I! Not if you are to be my rival. Zounds, Neville, that would require too much effort. No, no, you shall have that honor all to yourself.”

“Yet you think I might fail.”

“I merely wondered aloud what you would do if you did.”

“I shall not.”

“Yet will not seducing her anger your father even more?” Foz questioned. “He might never forgive you.”

“He loathes me now, and I can scarce sink lower in his estimation.”

“Very well. You are quite certain you will succeed in proving to your father that the woman he thinks superior to you in virtue is not,” Richard said. “The only question that remains is, how long will it take?”

“With so much at stake, you can be assured I will be diligent,” Neville replied, his tone grave, but his eyes gleaming with the thrill of the hunt.

“Even though you are sure to triumph in the end, I cannot help thinking it will not be as easy as you believe, if she is a Puritan,” Richard observed.

“Puritan or no, I’ll wager within a fortnight,” Foz cried excitedly. “Ten pounds says she will be in Neville’s bed in that time!”

Neville regarded his literary friend with a cool smile. “What say you, Richard? Would you care to wager on how long it will take to make the citadel of my Nemesis’s virtue fall?”

Richard leaned back and regarded Neville impassively. “Since I have not seen the lady in question, I hardly think that would be wise.”

“But you are so knowing in the ways of women. Isn’t that what everybody says after they see one of your plays?” Neville replied. “So what need you know but that I am determined and she is not ugly?”

He thought of mentioning the kiss, then decided against it. Let Richard believe this seduction difficult; that would make his eventual triumph even sweeter.

“Very well. I’ll wager it will take longer than a fortnight.”

“Longer? Are you mad?” Foz cried.

Neville continued to regard his friend, suddenly not quite so certain himself he could succeed with Arabella in a mere fourteen days, despite the passion in her kiss. Yet he would die before he would reveal any lack of confidence to his friends.

“Very well, Richard,” he said. “Prepare to lose your money. However, I could use more than ten pounds.”

“Then we shall make it more sporting, shall we?” Richard said. “I am willing to wager fifty.”

“What?” Foz gasped. “Fifty pounds!”

“Come now, Foz,” Richard said calmly. “What is fifty pounds to you?”

“You don’t have fifty pounds,” Neville charged. He had scarce five pounds in his purse; nor did Richard have much more, he ventured. What, then, was he to make of this astonishing sum? Was Richard that confident he would fail?

“Neither do you, but I could get it,” Richard countered. “Are you beginning to doubt your abilities?”

“Not a whit. Fifty pounds, then, that I can get Lady Arabella into my bed in a fortnight.”

“What will you give for proof of success?”

“If my word is not enough,” Neville brazenly declared, “then she will tell you herself. Will that content you?”

“If you can debauch a Puritan woman and then persuade her to confirm her sinful act to us, I will most certainly be content,” Richard agreed.

“Surely debauch is too harsh a term for what I have in mind. Nevertheless, give me your hands, gentlemen,” Neville replied, “and we shall seal our wager.”

Richard and Foz placed their hands over Neville’s and they shook them once.

“I suggest you begin searching for those fifty pounds, Richard,” Neville remarked.

Richard got to his feet. “You will forgive me if I do not wish you luck, Neville. Now, I must get to the theater. I fear my actresses are going to do each other injury if I am not there to come between them.”

“Perhaps you require some assistance, Richard,” Neville proposed, “although really, sir, if you persist in having more than one mistress at a time, I think you have only yourself to blame when war breaks out between them.”

The former cavalier bowed courteously. “I learned from a master.”

“Yet you bid against me.”

Richard continued to smile as he regarded Neville with a steadfast scrutiny that made Neville feel he had just made a terrible blunder. “Even a master may fail occasionally.”

“Or succeed where doubt is cast. Well, let us all go and we shall see if either I or Foz can enable a truce.”

“Should you not go direct to Lady Arabella?” Foz asked anxiously.

“Oh, I shall see her soon enough,” Neville replied with a sly and secretive smile, for he had the beginnings of his siege already mapped within his head.

Chapter 4

A
rabella awoke with a start.

Immediately she knew that she was not in her old home, or the ornate bedroom she had been given in Lord Barrsettshire’s country house. She was in the earl’s townhouse in London in a bedchamber at the opposite end of the corridor from the earl’s. For confirmation, several church bells tolled the hour: three of the clock.

However, it was not the sound of the bells that had woken her, she realized. It was another, more local noise: the soft scratching of mice in the wall across from her.

Sitting up, she reached for the bed curtains and pulled them open. Moonlight flooded in through the mullioned window, making diamond-shaped patterns on the bare wooden floor.

She lay down again and told herself there
was nothing to fear. It was only a harmless little mouse burrowing through the wall. Or perhaps a few of them. Surely it was not a rat.

At that more distressing thought, her first instinct was to pull the covers over her head. However, she also knew that if she did not discover what was making that noise, she would never be able to go back to sleep.

Therefore, clad in her thin nightdress, she rose from her bed and with chilly fingers struck flint and steel to kindle the rushlight set in the holder on the table beside her bed. The rushlight burned up brightly, then settled into a fairly steady, if dim, flame.

Before picking up the holder, she wrapped a shawl about her shoulders and found her thick boots in the chest that had arrived that afternoon with the rest of the baggage. She had no desire to be creeping about a strange place in her bare feet looking for small furry creatures.

With her other hand, she lifted the basin Jar-vis had set beside the ewer of water on the table. Thus armed, she crept into the hall.

A thin stream of golden light issued from beneath the door of the room that shared a wall with hers. It had been closed when she had come upstairs earlier, and Jarvis had not said to whom it belonged. As she drew near, the scratching noise grew louder. And then she heard a muffled curse.

Moving cautiously forward, she gently
pushed at the door with the basin, opening it wider so that she could peer inside.

A single candle burned upon a table near the head of a bed, aiding the moonlight. At once Arabella realized this room was much cleaner than hers was. The curtained bed sported linen and a brocade coverlet, none of which had been lately disturbed.

She opened the door a little wider, trying to see more of the room.

She stifled a gasp as a half-naked Neville Farrington came into view, his back to her as he washed his face. His powerful arms that had held her upon the stairs were like those of the blacksmith in Grantham, lean and sinewy, and his exposed, unexpectedly muscular back tapered to a thin waist above narrow hips. Thick, black, curling hair brushed his broad, bare shoulders.

It was Neville’s own hair, too, she confirmed. No wig accounted for his dark ringlets, but only Nature’s hand, as if She had decided to give this mortal man the ultimate finishing touch.

It was not that she had never seen a man without his shirt on before. Living in the country, she had seen farm laborers thus unattired in the warm summer months many times—but she had never seen any man quite like this one, who could have provided a model for Adonis or Apollo, so well formed was he.

Breathing a little faster, she licked her lips, thinking of the pressure of his mouth upon hers when he had kissed her.

And the excitement that had coursed through her. The yearning. The need.

She told herself to go back to her room at once.

As he leaned forward, his black breeches grew snug around his backside and thighs, which showed that every part of his body was well formed and muscular. His skin glowed bronze in the candlelight, adding to her impression that he could be a sculptor’s model.

She might have stayed thus, merely watching and remembering, for a long time. But he suddenly turned and stared right at her.

Before she could run away, he crossed the floor, grabbed her arm and pulled her into the room. Dismayed, she twisted out of his grasp, knocking the door shut behind her. Then she accidentally touched the flame of the rushlight to his hand.