The Earl Takes a Lover (2 page)

Meredith and Pru, having been seen, had condescended to exchange pleasantries with Henry Winthrops. “If I can't see your face,” he said, his voice pitched low, “I'll have to look at something else.” His comment was rewarded by a jerk of the parasol, and he could tell by the mulish set of her mouth that she was torn between keeping her face concealed or moving the parasol so he would stop staring at her breasts. Or hitting him with it; Robin thought that was a distinct possibility.

Before any of these could occur, Meredith said, “King George is mad again, Robin. They've taken him to Kew Palace and unpacked the turquoise damask.”

At Pen's look of perplexity, he explained, “It's a waistcoat, tailored expressly for ease while dressing and undressing in a disordered mental state.”

“Disordered!” interjected Winthrop senior volubly. “The government is headless!”

Meredith frowned. “Don't make bones over trifles, Henry. The prince regent will have everything well in hand. Although it is sad for George. I suppose he'll be trying to shake hands with trees again. The government will not topple, but it is distressing nonetheless to have one's own monarch
non compos mentis.
” She sniffed and looked sad. For King George, but also because sniffing reminded her of her dead husband, who had often taken snuff from a gilt enamel box tucked in his waistcoat pocket.

Pru patted her on the knee. “He'll recover. He has before.”

Pen was watching a flock of starlings in the beech trees near the carriage path. Something had startled them; they rose in concert and wheeled away as one body through the air. Robin stared at Pen, possessed of the odd sensation that were he without shoes, and were she barefoot as well, he could capture her two feet between his larger ones and stroke them in some sort of commiseration. Prudence scattered this train of thought like a fox in the henhouse with a simple question to Meredith. “When is Robin getting married?” Then to Robin: “It's high time, you know. You must do your duty. It isn't as if London is lacking in eligible females this season.”

Robin's left hand, visible to Pen where she sat opposite, had been idly tapping on the outermost edge of the carriage door. At Pru's question, the tapping ceased abruptly, hand poised as if to take flight. It then came up to pinch the bridge of his nose. “I'm twenty-nine,” he averred, “I have time.”

“Twenty-nine!” Pru barked. “Many are dead by forty. You may have less time than you know, and do think of your poor mother.
She's
not twenty-nine.”

Penelope took pity on Robin, though she was not sure he deserved it. “Lady Dalrymple.” She leaned over with a light touch on Pru's arm. “Did you not wish to stop in at the apothecary's on the way home?”

“Oh, dear, yes. Thank you for reminding me, Penelope. Would you mind?” she asked Meredith. “I require a tonic for the indigestion.” Robin's wishes were apparently not paramount; he was not consulted. “Hadley's? No. Doctor Spencer on Pudding Lane.” Pru and Meredith lapsed into a comparison of Hadley versus Spencer, and Robin's duty, dropped like a stone into the sea, disappeared instantly from view.

He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to kiss her anyway, but for distracting Pru he wanted to kiss her especially. His forthcoming nuptials were a topic of conversation he viewed with dread. Why, in particular, so much dread was a question he would have had to actually contemplate to answer, thus he had attained little clarity on the subject. If pressed, he would have deemed it in no way necessary, the problem of the heir notwithstanding. And if unnecessary, why undertaken? He abandoned the subject in favor of a far more interesting preoccupation: how to get this woman naked and beneath him at the first opportunity.

At the apothecary's, Meredith and Pru descended, leaving Pen in the carriage with Robin. The lengthening silence failed to seem awkward, possibly because the burgeoning pain in her head precluded it. “What ails you?” he asked.

Pen blinked in surprise and answered without evasion. “My head aches.” Robin motioned for the footman to raise the calèche. “Thank you.” Pen sighed with relief as the sun, on its downward path to set, gave way to shade. “Does it show?”

“In your eyes,” he confirmed, lightly touching her forehead. “Where does it hurt?” She jerked away, then winced. His questing fingers made delicate tracings on her face. The privacy of the raised calèche allowed him the liberty to do what he could not in an open conveyance.

“Please do not,” Pen said. “It isn't proper. They'll see.”

This amused him. “They won't see. We'll hear them coming.” This truth was so evident that Pen smiled in spite of the pain.

Robin needed to touch her. Preferably sexually, but if not then in this way. He moved to sit near her, pulling her back against his chest. “Don't,” she said again, but her tone lacked conviction and he ignored it.

“Close your eyes,” he instructed softly, and when she obeyed without demur he raised his hands to her face. He touched her gently, but with no sexual intent, and thus Pen found it comforting. He caressed her cheeks and smoothed her temples and cradled her forehead in one hand and massaged her nape with the other. Her spine, stiff at first, softened and curled until it pressed into his belly, an agreeable, if limited, sensation.

Time passed in the usual way, though Pen had little sense of it. He did not stop and she did not move away. As if he sensed the pain in her head was less, one arm dropped lower, fingers curling around the knob of her shoulder. He eased her forward and the other hand began the same sweet work on her back and shoulders.

“Oh,” she moaned, low and fervent. “That is heaven.”

His mouth quirked. These were exactly the words he wished her to speak; only the context was a little off. No matter. He would right that sooner or later, though preferably, of course, sooner.

Pen resembled a molded jelly by the time Pru and Meredith trundled into the carriage, clutching numerous paper-wrapped packages between them. “Do you see,” said Pru, with much the same mien as a cock crowing at dawn. “He is better than Hadley, as I told you.”

 

Lady Dalrymple dropped the news sheet, which wafted to the floor and lay there peaceably, despite its full complement of ill news. “Well,” she announced, “as unorthodox as it was to leave London midseason, it appears to have been prescient thinking on my part. George is no better and London is suffering the doldrums.”

“Stop pacing, dear, you'll wear a track in the Aubusson.”

“Sorry,” Pen said quickly. “I can't seem to settle to anything.”

“Go for a walk,” Pru suggested, “but be back for supper. Meredith will have arrived by then, and most likely the Cavendish sisters and perhaps the Payson-Marches, as well. They were only too pleased to be given an excuse to quit London.” Pen heard little after “Meredith.” The downy hairs on her arms prickled. Pru had said nothing of Robin, so why assume he was coming? She told herself it was just as well, but she felt listless.

In her chamber that evening, changing for company, Pen surveyed herself in the cheval glass. In the main she thought of herself as a person favored by fortune. She could have grown up a whore; no one would have thought twice. Her mother had given birth to her at the Black Swan and died a week later of childbed fever without revealing the identity of the father. Instead of leaving her in a basket at the orphanage door, Salamandre and the others had raised her, a catch-as-catch-can childhood to be certain, but no worse than many. At eleven, a client catching sight of her in the stairwell had decided to relieve his urges with her instead of with Anne, who was waiting for him in room fourteen—a detrimental decision on his part, as Salamandre, drawn by Pen's vociferous screaming, knocked him on the head with the bag of crowns she had been in the act of counting.

Much worse to Pen's shocked mind than the scuffle on the stairs, which had not proceeded far enough to do any real damage, was the transference at three o'clock the next day of herself and her meager possessions to St. Mary-le-Bow convent in Cheapside. The Mother declined to accept anything so venal as coin for Pen's keep, and negotiated a soul-saving pledge of church attendance for Salamandre and a number of women employed at the Swan. There she had resided from the ages of eleven to twenty-two, whereupon she had been sent, a lady by any other name, to live as a paid companion to the Dowager Countess Prudence Dalrymple at Cheyning Court.

She had a round face and strangely shaped eyes—her mother's eyes, they had told her—straight, thick brown hair, unamenable to the ringlet styles of the day. Of small breasts, sloping shoulders and slim hips, she had none. Her neck was long enough, but ended decisively at straight shoulders, which gave way peremptorily to large breasts and wide hips, though between these two eminences her waist was pleasingly small. She was not society's idea of a great beauty, but to herself, in this personal regard, she seemed familiar and friendly. Pen finished tying the ribbon in her hair, wrinkling her nose at her reflection. For good measure she stuck out her tongue, turning from the glass to run quickly down the stairs.

She walked into the hard chest of the Earl of Thanet as though she had walked into a brick wall. As her leaping senses identified him, her throat closed, her breath stopped, and her heart beat at triple its usual pace, the obvious result of which was a dizzy spell. Pen had never swooned in her life. She was not wearing a corset. The current Grecian-inspired dresses did not allow even for the stiffly boned stays of previous years. She was left quite unfortunately without a single item of clothing on which to blame her ignominious state: half-fainting and held upright between Robin's strong arms.

A general hubbub ensued. The Cavendish sisters, as they acted only in tandem, vacated their seats and then could not decide which seat Pen should occupy. Pru sent for her salts. Meredith patted her on the arm and said yes, running down the stairs too quickly, it was bound to happen, an idea Pen seized on as a lifeline in turbulent waters. She avoided looking at Robin, although the same could not be said of him in return. The salts were brought. Water was brought. Her heart continued to thump along at an alarming rate, but was luckily concealed by her left breast. She managed to greet Robin as was customary in polite society, received a bow in return and Tony opened the door and announced that supper was served.

 

Sometimes Pen used the servants' stairwell. It was steep and narrow and two could not pass abreast without bumping and jostling, but if one was at that end of the house and one was late for church and one was sent to get Pru's special parasol that she must have and the servants could never find, then it was faster. Save Pen and the servants, no one used it, which was why it surprised Pen greatly to find herself face to face with Robin on the small landing below the second story. Her heart, lately an unfaithful companion, began to pound erratically. He smiled, which did little to help matters in the pounding department, but was propitious for the spot low in her abdomen which began, like a flower in the sun, to unfurl itself a petal at a time. “Lord Tufton,” she greeted him, backing up a step.

“Don't you dare Lord me,” he growled. “You have my name. Use it.”

Pen licked her lips, considering. Since his arrival at Cheyning Court, they had not been alone. The whole point of the London season was parties and balls, but the populace felt constrained; it did not do to make merry when George was taking off his clothes and running starkers through the grounds at Kew, and God might know why, but none of his physicians did. As a result, half of London—the rich half—had removed themselves to Cheyning Court. Pen could be alone virtually anytime Pru had no need of her, but Robin was an eligible earl and had not been left alone for a waking moment. Pen had learned a few things in a week: how he liked his tea and the sound of his tread across a marble floor and the little cough he made when he cleared his throat in conversation because he disagreed but had no intention of saying so. Those outer markers were there, but they did not matter. The core of him that lived as a mass in his chest or belly was what she knew, and no amount of knowledge about tea or politics could affect it. It was a form of alchemy and like so much about him, if someone had told her of it before meeting him, she would have laughed blithely in disbelief at the notion.

“Robin,” she replied, nothing so blithe now, her voice gone low and gritty simply from the way he was staring at her. Maybe the week had worn on him, as well. It couldn't be pleasant to be stalked, however politely, by a herd of marriage-minded misses whose idea of conversation was tedious at best. She backed up another step, lifting her skirt higher than she needed to in the process.

Robin had not been planning to see her. He was late for church and the servants' stairs were quicker; one could hurl oneself pell-mell down them without raising an eyebrow. But here she was, and he was in no mood to let the opportunity pass by. “Stop backing up,” he commanded, to little noticeable effect.

She laughed at him. “Full of demands this morning, aren't we? And if you don't move, we're going to get a scolding from Pru, not to mention the minister.”

Robin was sure of only two things at that moment and unfortunately for both Pru and the minister, the time that church began was neither of them. He was going to kiss her, and she was going to want him to. “Church by all means,” he agreed pleasantly. “I'm not preventing you.” He backed up against the wall, giving her all possible room to pass, which was, thankfully, very little. She had done nothing but surprise him. In a distant corner of his mind, he wondered why he was surprised when she stopped on the stair above, her mouth level with his, and kissed him. It was bold. It was something a woman of experience would do, but her lips were not experienced. They were tentative and seeking and hungry and he all but groaned with pleasure and need.