The Wagered Miss Winslow (11 page)

As a matter of fact, he knew himself to be in imminent danger of a full-fledged attack by this entrancing scrap of a female, and he had the distinct impression that he might end up on the losing side of that particular confrontation.

“Now, Rosalind—” he began, just to have her pop up from her seat, one hand on her hip, the other pointing at his face. Her shawl, which had so effectively hidden her creamy shoulders from his gaze, slipped a notch, and he was momentarily diverted by the sight.

“And that’s another thing! Who gave you permission to address me so informally?”

His slow smile began with a slight twitch of his lips and didn’t stop until it succeeded in crinkling the tanned skin at the outside corners of his bright blue eyes. “Why, you did, darlin’, when you agreed to wed me, don’t you remember? I can hardly call my affianced wife ‘Miss Winslow,’ now can I? Just as you should be calling me Beau. ‘Mr. Remington’ is so formal for a betrothed husband, don’t you think?”

The bodice of her gown rose and fell as her breathing became agitated, a sight to delight Beau’s appreciative eyes. “You’re right. How remiss of me. First I am corrected—lectured, actually—by a high-nosed valet, and now I am taken to task by a man who hasn’t had the decency to explain a slight discrepancy in his dramatic, heartbreakingly sentimental tale of past injustice and eventual vindication. I shouldn’t be so stiff and formal, should I—
Bobby
!”

“T
hat tears it!” Beau shot back at her, grabbing her arm and seating her most unceremoniously on the settee. He glared down at her, shaking his head, his expression one of mingled anger and bleak disappointment. “You’re not about to give it up, are you, Rosie! You’re bound and determined to hear it all.”

Inwardly quaking, for she feared she had roused a sleeping beast that lurked just beneath the polished surface of this English gentleman, Rosalind thrust out her chin and declared flatly, “Every last bit of it, sirrah—and then, if I detect a single word of untruth, I will most happily say good-bye to you!”

Beau lowered his head into his hand, knowing he had behaved badly. It wasn’t Rosalind’s fault that he did not like speaking of his past, not that he wasn’t proud of it. But it pained him, this rehashing of long-buried memories, so that he would have gladly postponed it, delayed the telling until it didn’t matter anymore.

“Very well, Rosalind,” he said at last, collapsing his long frame into a facing chair. “We will forget dinner and have a story instead.”

“A true story?” Rosalind questioned, still harboring a niggling fear that Niall had put Beaumont Remington up to this whole scheme.

“I’ll speak the truth and shame the devil,” Beau said, looking at her levelly. “But perhaps you’d like to have me swear it on the Bible? Unless you’re afraid I’ll give it a calfskin fiddle.”

Rosalind, feeling rather ashamed of herself, could only ask, “And what is a calfskin fiddle?”

Beau smiled, easing a majority of Rosalind’s apprehensions. “Why, that, m’ darlin’, is a time-honored practice of kissing one’s thumb while pretending to kiss the calfskin cover of the Bible to swear one’s oath. You have lived a quiet life here in Sussex, haven’t you, my fine colleen?

Rosalind avoided meeting Beau’s eyes. “Just get on with it, please, Mr. Remington. I wouldn’t be so crass as to ask you to kiss the family Bible.”

There was simply no easy way to begin, so Beau took a deep breath and jumped in with both feet. “My mother died bringing her only child safely into this world,” he said simply, deliberately ignoring Rosalind’s sharp intake of breath. “My father stayed here, in this house, just long enough to bury his wife and see his son christened before he took himself and his heartbreak off to London, where he had the great misfortune of meeting up with your father, the late George Winslow.”

“And my father won the estate in a card game,” Rosalind interrupted. “I know this part of the story, Mr. Remington, although I must remind you that you have already told me that you too amassed a considerable fortune by that same means.”

“But never at the expense of a man made vulnerable by grief or by preying on some witless, green-as-grass youth fresh from the country, the soil of his tenant farms still clinging to his boots,” Beau asserted vehemently, so ferociously that Rosalind quickly vowed not to interrupt him again.

“My father came back to Remington Manor, tearfully confessed to Bridget all he had done, kissed me one last time, and then went off to the family mausoleum ... and shot himself,” Beau said after a moment, his voice devoid of expression. “I do not condone his method of escaping his grief, but I believe I understand it. He had lost his wife and he had gambled away his son’s inheritance. He could see no way to go on.”

Rosalind was genuinely upset. Had her father even been aware that his gambling win had served to dispossess an infant? He had never said anything about it, but Winslow Manor had never been his favorite holding. He seemed, now that she thought about it, vaguely embarrassed to talk about the place, although her interest in it had given him pleasure. “But that’s terrible! You—I mean, the Remington boy—was only a helpless baby. Surely Mr. Remington made provisions for his son?”

Beau smiled. “Still hoping against hope that I am not Beaumont Remington, aren’t you, m’ darlin’—that this is all a fiction conjured up by your scheming brother, with me doing his dirty work for him. But I
am
Beaumont Remington, I assure you, although even I was not made aware of that morsel of information before another dozen years had passed.

“Bridget, you see, was a resourceful miss. Knowing that I had no relatives to take me in, and knowing that your father was about to come to Sussex to claim his winnings, leaving me to live or die on the charity of strangers, Bridget gathered me up and— ‘borrowing’ a few pieces of the family silver to pay for our fare—she took me back to Dublin, to her people.”

Rosalind began pleating the fabric of her paisley shawl between her fingers. “Renaming the infant Bobby Reilly and claiming him as her own,” she mused out loud, “knowing of the Irish disdain for all things English.”

“Very good, Rosie!” Beau’s mind swung back to the years he had spent running the cobbled streets of Dublin, wild as any of his mates, flinging dung at English carriages and feeling very superior in the knowledge that he, Bobby Reilly, was an honest, God-fearing Irishman. “But when I was twelve, just after Bridget’s father—the man I believed to be my grandfather—died without ever once saying he loved me, she sat me down and told me the truth. I wasn’t Irish at all—I was one of those dirty Sassenachs, and her father had only tolerated me because of Bridget.”

Rosalind’s tender heart was touched, and she buried forever any thought that the story she was hearing was not the truth. The tale was too cruelly brutal and too simply told to be anything else. “You must nave been crushed,” she said as Beau looked toward the long windows and the dusk that was just beginning to settle over the estate. “What did you do?”

He turned back to her, his smile wide and somewhat sheepish. “What did I do? Ah, Rosie, and what do you think I did? I was not an easy child, as Bridget will no doubt tell you—she fair delights in recounting the heartaches my wild ways have brought her. What did I do? I did what any headstrong child of twelve would do. I woke before dawn the very next morning, stole myself a dinghy at the far end of the docks, and set out to sea, determined to row my skinny, dispossessed, underfed self all the way to England so that I could skewer George Winslow for having brought my father to grief.”

“You didn’t!”

“I swear it on the saints, m’ darlin’, although I hate admitting to being such a brainless youth. I was at sea for nearly two days, and all but perishing of thirst—for I hadn’t thought to provide myself with anything in the way of sustenance—when a mighty storm rolled over the horizon, turning day to night.”

As Beau became more involved in telling his story, his earlier reluctance fading away as some of the good memories came flooding back, Rosalind leaned forward on the settee, as entranced as she would be by a fine play unfolding before her on a stage. “Go on,” she prompted anxiously. “What happened next?”

Beau threw back his head and laughed out loud as his recollections grew more vivid. He had told some of his story to Woodrow, of course, but it had been more than three years since he had recounted the whole of it to anybody. “I was rescued by one of His Royal Majesty’s ships, pulled out of the raging sea by a naval officer named Mr. Hampshire, as a matter of fact. Ah, Rosie, imagine my chagrin, the crushing humiliation of being hoisted aboard one of the hated Sassenach ships by the seat of my pants, and laughed at by a crew of black-hearted Englishmen!

“Instead of falling to m’knees and kissing the deck, I flew at my rescuers with a will, biting and kicking and demanding to be allowed to be thrown back into the sea, to drown like a true Irishman. Mr. Hampshire cuffed me good for that little display, then stripped me to the buff right there on the deck, rolled me up tight in a blanket, and stuffed me into his own bunk.”

Beau felt his eyes beginning to sting as he remembered his old friend. “Mr. Hampshire,” he said, shaking his head. “Tall as a tree and twice as wide— what a devil of a man he was. Dubbed me ‘Fish’ when I wouldn’t tell him my name, and the name stuck, even after I recovered from the fever I was struck with and was made cabin boy. The name suited me down to the ground, for I didn’t know who I was, you see, Bobby or Beau.”

“Cabin boy?” Rosalind didn’t understand. “Surely they didn’t just sail off with you? What of Bridget? She must have been out of her mind with worry.”

“Of course the ship sailed on,” Beau said with all the long-suffering forbearance of a man explaining the obvious to a woman. “The captain wasn’t about to turn the ship about for the convenience of a wild-eyed, nearly illiterate black-Irish peasant with the disposition of a mad Russian, now was he? And so, Bridget was left to her worries, and I was off with Nelson and Jervis, to trounce the Spanish fleet at Cape Saint Vincent.”

He smiled at Rosalind, who was just then feeling very much in charity with Bridget Reilly who, like herself, had been on the receiving end of the pain suffered as a result of a man’s convenient way of forgetting a woman’s existence when adventure beckoned.

“Now don’t frown, Rosie,” Beau admonished, rising to go fetch his glass of wine, for this storytelling was dry work and was beginning to prey on his thirst. “War being what it is, and boys being what boys ever were and ever will be, I soon became reconciled to my fate and went about the business of becoming a first-rate seaman. Mr. Hampshire was a great help to me, looking out for my skin whenever the shooting started, and teaching me my letters and sums during the long, boring days between battles. Within a year I was able to pen a letter to Bridget, who told me later that she had believed I had disappeared off the face of the earth.

“I grew both in mind and in body, but I kept my secret, and I kept my resentment alive, biding my time until I would be tall enough, and strong enough, and powerful enough to stand toe-to-toe with George Winslow and, one way or another, bring the man down. I think that thought kept me alive until the war was over, even after Mr. Hampshire took a ball in the chest and died in my arms, leaving me with yet another mission before I would be free to reclaim my birthright.”

“Another mission?” Rosalind stood as well, unable to sit still as she felt herself becoming more and more involved in the story of little Bobby Reilly, little Fish—and the not-so-little, never-to-be-believed-helpless man who stood before her.

“Mr. Hampshire left a daughter behind, a motherless child now orphaned. I had no choice but to go to her once I was free of the navy and, not knowing what else to do with her, take her to Bridget. We lived as best we could for a few years, which is a story for another time. Cassandra’s married now, and a countess, leaving me free at last to get on with my quest to regain Remington Manor. I traveled to the Continent to make my fortune with the skill at cards I had learned while aboard ship, hired Wood- row to put a bit of town polish on me, took back my rightful name at last, and entered Society in time to discover that your father had died some five years ago.”

He grinned wryly at Rosalind. “Twenty-three years of planning. Twenty-three years of waiting, just to be thwarted yet again.”

“You must have been gravely disappointed,” Rosalind commented, momentarily forgetting that it was her own father whom Beaumont Remington had planned to ruin. “And then you met my brother.”