Outrageously Yours (15 page)

Throwing off Ned’s dressing gown, she went to the balcony’s edge and leaned out over the rail. The breeze swept beneath her nightshirt, lifting the hem to her knees. Goose bumps swathed her legs, but she didn’t care, didn’t try to pull the gown lower. There was no one to see her, no movement on the darkened garden paths but for the blowing foliage.

The same madcap wind whipped the clouds aside and freed the moon, a luminous disk as bright as Lord Harrow’s magnets were black. Ivy raised her face as if the silver rays could warm her and bring a summer glow to her cheeks, as if it could surround her with a protective force that no evil could penetrate.

She raised her arms to the moon, then lowered them and smoothed her hands down her torso. Her breasts, bound by day to appear nonexistent, luxuriated in their lack of restraint. How liberating to free them, to feel the cool air against them. A thought crept into her mind, one that shocked her . . . and sent her gaze skimming over the house. All the windows but hers were dark. It was late; no one would be up. No one would see.

Quickly she untied the lacings of her nightshirt and drew the linen garment down past her shoulders to her waist. The night ran its chilling caress over her breasts, plucking at her nipples until they stood erect. Shivering only slightly, she offered a shaky smile to the radiant moon and felt the essence of her female self reawakening inside her.

A shift in the wind brought a surge of unexpected warmth. It wrapped around her, reached inside her. Suddenly it wasn’t the wind tantalizing her skin, her womanly parts. It was Lord Harrow, or her imagined ideal of him—his strong arms, his large hands, his moist lips trailing down her breasts to tease her nipples. The notion sent hot shivers raining through her, tremors edged in yearning and fear, a forbidden desire as raw as any molten element produced in his laboratory.

What she had seen today all but proved that he was dangerous, deranged. Yet she longed for him with an ache that tightened her breasts and tugged at the lowest regions of her belly. In that instant, if he had stepped out onto the balcony behind her, Ivy would have thrown caution to the wild thrust of the winds and gladly offered herself to him.

Lucky for her he did not step out of the shadows. But as she pulled her nightshirt into place, scooped up her dressing gown, and hurried back inside, his image followed in her mind’s eye, and his pale gaze held her trapped as she hugged Miss Matilda and tried in vain to fall to sleep.

 

Simon half knelt on the embrasure of the laboratory’s southward window, his fingers pressing against the diamond panes, the rest of him rendered immobile by the scene taking place far below. Ned had stolen outside moments ago and now shed her dressing gown, letting it fall to the stones at her feet.

In the moonlight, her nightshirt glowed like mist as she drifted to the rail. The wind plastered the garment to her body, displaying curves Simon had only imagined until now. Helpless to resist the sight, he stared as she raised her face to the moon, her lovely curls tossing, the arch of her neck and spine revealing enticing, tormenting secrets about the shape and size of her breasts.

A tug at her nightshirt propelled him closer to the glass. What was she doing? Suddenly she turned and looked up. Through the dark distance their gazes met; she looked right at him. Damning his indiscretion, Simon drew back.

The right thing would have been to walk away, but her next actions suggested that perhaps she hadn’t seen him after all. When he thought about it, how could she have? With the moon so bright, he hadn’t bothered to light a candle. The laboratory lay in shadow while soft candle glow from inside her room bathed the balcony . . . and Ned’s slender, linen-clad form.

Except . . . Dear God. His breath hitched. She had slipped her arms from the sleeves and shoved the nightshirt to her waist. Simon’s throat closed around an acute throbbing while flame rippled from his heart to his loins.

His body reacted even before his mind formed the question: if he held her naked in his arms, would he find her as soft and smooth as she looked right now, gilded and perfect in the moonlight?

He would likely never know. Pulling away from the window, he knelt against the embrasure. She loathed him. Or feared him. He didn’t know which. But after today he knew of a certainty that she held him in low regard. He should be glad, relieved. To lust for her physically was one thing. But to love again . . .

Losing Aurelia had ripped him apart. He’d gone half mad, truly earning the nickname whispered by the students when they thought he couldn’t hear.

No.
God, no.
It was far too soon to lose his heart to another.

He had one choice, then, one way to stop the madness from overtaking him as it had when Aurelia died. Reaching a decision, he braved a final glance out the window, seeking one more memory of the audacious girl named Ned, only to see that he was too late. She had retrieved her dressing gown and returned to her room, the only evidence that she had been there at all the lingering ache beneath his breastbone.

After a sleepless night, he rose and breakfasted early. When he’d finished his coffee and grown tired of pushing his eggs around on his plate, he asked Mrs. Walsh to send Ned out to the gardens the moment he came downstairs.

“He’s a strange one, that Mr. Ivers,” the woman muttered beneath her breath as if not intending Simon to overhear but quite satisfied that he did.

He trudged the garden paths half blindly, bombarded with the many reminders of Aurelia’s lasting influence on Harrowood.
This
arbor she had designed, and
this
statue she had purchased during their honeymoon in Paris, and
this
and
this
and
this
had all been introduced to the estate by her hands, her orders. For a brief, precious time, she had turned a gloomy relic into a cheerful haven.

This morning, through a softly veiling mist, he saw the signs of neglect, of Harrowood declining back into joylessness. It wasn’t for lack of funds, but lack of spirit. He simply hadn’t found the heart to love the place as she had, now that she was no longer part of it.

And yet, as he beheld the autumn blooms and the streaming jets of the fountain, he realized something vital had changed. He had begun to see Harrowood from a new perspective, one that grabbed him in a choke hold of regret.

Ned may not have contributed to the gardens or rearranged the house, but in a few short days she had left her indelible mark here. She would soon leave, but Simon entertained no doubts that he would continue to see her lovely face, framed in those unruly curls of hers, everywhere he turned. Around every corner, in every room and corridor, but most especially in his laboratory, her image would continue to haunt him. Her funny, clumsy falls, her determined, defiant little expressions, her unbridled enthusiasm with each new discovery . . .

Ah, how would he return to his equipment and experiments alone? What joy would he find there without her?

Reaching out, he stroked the dusky crimson blossom of a Dark Lady rose, one of Aurelia’s favorites. Ned liked roses, too. She had mentioned that her uncle had cultivated a rose garden. Stepping closer, he attempted to pluck the flower from where the stem branched from the main stalk. A sharp pain pricked his thumb, and a drop of blood spattered to the ground.

At the same moment, a scream ripped through the morning’s muffled quiet. Simon spun about in the direction from which it had come. A second scream sent him running toward the house.

 

Her heart pounding, Ivy made her way down the wide, curving garden steps. Why had Lord Harrow sent for her?

Had he discovered evidence of her incursion into his locked armoire? Was she about to be tossed out of Harrowood on her ear? Since discovering the shocking contents of that innocent-looking cask, she had more than once contemplated the wisdom of removing herself as far away from Harrowood as possible. But then she might never locate Lady Gwendolyn or recover Victoria’s stone. No, she must stay, must complete her mission.

Yet in truth, her fear of Lord Harrow’s grisly experiments posed far less of a dilemma than fear of her growing feelings for him, a man with perhaps a tenuous hold on his sanity. Today, then, assuming he did not throw her out, she must gain command of those fears—and feelings—and behave with a modicum of normalcy.

Or he surely would send her packing.

At the bottom of the steps, she continued down the sloping lawn to the half wall that marked the entrance to the upper tea garden. As she came through the arbor and around the box hedge, a hunched figure rounded on her, a pair of long, lethal shears aimed in her direction.

Ivy stumbled backward. The figure shuffled closer, emerging from the shadow of the hedges. Daylight tumbled across his distorted features: bulging eyes, misshapen cheeks, and a grotesque slash of a mouth. As he raised his weapon, his body listed at a precarious angle, his left shoulder a raised and twisted knot.

Ivy fell back into the hedge. Could this creature be the result of Lord Harrow’s experiments? Even as common sense rejected the possibility, the creature moved closer. Ivy cried out and thrashed to break free of the foliage.

The branches trapped her fast. The shears swung. Bracing for the slice of the blades through her flesh, she let out a scream that echoed through the gardens and against the house. A pair of iron bands closed around her arms and yanked her from the hedge.

“Ned! Ned! Calm down.” Lord Harrow spun her in his arms and gripped her shoulders. “There’s nothing wrong. Nothing to fear.”

“But ...” She raised a shaking hand to point behind her. Did he not see the creature? “That . . . man.”

“Cecil. My head groundskeeper and master gardener, who has just returned from a visit with his family.” Lord Harrow’s lips hardened in anger. He gave her shoulders a shake, a rebuke that filled her with instant shame. “I believe you owe him an apology.”

He physically turned her to face the servant. The tips of the shears were stuck in the dirt now, and the man leaned his misshapen body with a hand propped on the handles.

Her cheeks flaming, Ivy struggled to find her voice. “I am so terribly sorry. I hadn’t realized you were there and . . . those shears are rather frightful....”

“He was trimming the hedge,” Lord Harrow ground out behind her.

“Never mind, young sir.” Disturbing though his appearance was, Cecil’s voice proved as soothing as a Sunday hymn. “Mine’s a countenance even a mother’d be hard-pressed to love, though mine did her best. No harm done.”

His forbearance brought tears to Ivy’s eyes; she hastened to blink them away. “Thank you. I’m so sorry. A wretched misunderstanding. I promise from now on we shall be friends.”

“Very good, sir.” A conspiratorial gleam lit Cecil’s protruding eyes. “And we’ll both be remembering that beneath every surface lies a world to be discovered.” With a wink, he looked past her to Lord Harrow. “I’ll be tending to the bulbs now, my lord. Must get them out and stored before the first frost.”

“Yes, thank you, Cecil.”

Ivy watched the man waddle off, her nape tingling with a sense that he had seen clear through her disguise to the truth. Yet he hadn’t given her away. Had she found an unlikely ally? She turned back to Lord Harrow. “I’m very sorry—”

“Do you realize your ridiculous behavior might have lost me the most brilliant gardener in perhaps all of East Anglia? He is no monster, Ned.”

“I realize that, sir.”

“Do you? Cecil is no lowly servant, either. He hails from gentry, but he chooses to occupy this position because society will offer him no other place.”

He bore down on her as he spoke, his forceful stride sending her back several steps. “He accepted my apology. What more can I do?”

“You might explain what happened yesterday to turn my gifted assistant into a blithering simpleton capable of passing judgment on my own wife’s cousin based solely on appearances.”

Stiffening, Ivy gasped. “Your wife ...”

“Yes, Cecil is a distant cousin of the Quincys. But that is beside the point.”

“Does he know . . . ?” she whispered. Her next words spilled out in a torrent. “Does he know what you’ve done to her? What you’ve done
with
her?”

Lord Harrow’s features darkened ominously. “What the devil are you talking about? Have you been listening to rumors? Are you that much of a blasted fool?”

Fear and revulsion lashed through her; she shook her head in denial. “I didn’t need to. I’ve seen the evidence. Dear God in heaven—”

Lord Harrow pounced, seizing the front of her coat in his fist. “Are you speaking of the armoire? Did you open it?”

“I did. . . . I did and I saw.” Trying to pull from his grasp, Ivy cried out.

Lord Harrow raised his voice to be heard. “You little fool, you don’t know what you saw. I’d have shown you myself when I thought you were ready.”

Ivy tugged in vain against his hold. “You promised my conscience would not be compromised.”

“And it has not been, not by me. But you . . . Yesterday I trusted you with my keys, with full access to my life’s work. And you could not wait to betray that trust. Why, Ned?” His voice dropped to a ragged whisper. “Damn you,
why
?”

Ivy cried out again as Lord Harrow’s grip on her coat tightened. Suddenly he gave a yank that brought her colliding with his chest. The garden blurred. His arms went around her and his mouth descended on hers, sending shock waves of astonishment blasting through her. But contrary to his palpable anger and the steely force running through his limbs, his lips were warm and soft, and took hers with a gentle insistence that fired her blood and turned her knees to melted wax.

His arms held her in place while his lips nuzzled hers open and his tongue swept her mouth. A multitude of sensations flooded her at once. The faint richness of coffee, the sharpness of the starch in his shirt, the abrasion of the morning stubble across his chin . . . the solid demand of his body against her own.