Trouble With Harry (5 page)

“You swear you won't ever marry, so such knowledge is of no use to you. What are you doing there sitting in the corner in the dark?” Plum, having reassured herself that her heart was not going to leap out of her chest, returned to warming the soup.

“Feeding mice. Their mother was taken by one of the cats that live in the shed. I've found that they'll drink milk easily enough if I use a piece of straw.”

Plum gave a resigned sigh at the newest inhabitants of their little cottage and hunted for the stale heel of bread she remembered seeing.

“As for the other, I do not intend ever to marry—at least none of the gentlemen you think are so suitable. They're nothing but idle fribbles, bent on wenching their way through their lives. But I should like to see your book nonetheless. After all, one does not have to be married to perform calisthenics, connubial or otherwise.”

Plum's cheeks heated as she turned to glare at her niece. “No, one doesn't, as I know well, but issues of morality aside, to do otherwise is to put yourself in a position of disadvantage. Women have little enough control over their lives, and even less power against men. Marriage at least offers some protection.”

Thom shrugged and bent over the clutch of tiny pink bodies squirming in her lap. Plum found the heel of bread, tapped it on the counter, winced at the solid
thunk
, then sighed and tossed it into the goat's bucket.

“Is that why you went to meet with Mr. Harris? For protection?”

“No,” Plum answered and bent down to look in the one small cupboard that served as their pantry. Surely there were a few greens left from last week? A bit of suet their neighbor had given them? A handful of dried beans? “I met with the gentleman—his name is Haversham—and have accepted his offer of marriage because I wish to be married again and have a family, and he seemed a pleasant man. Wasn't there a rind of cheese?”

Thom ducked her head and carefully allowed milk to drip from the tip of the straw into the little pink mouth of the baby mouse.

Plum straightened up, dusting off her hands. “I see. I don't suppose you ate it?”

Thom's shoulder twitched.

“No, I can see you didn't.” Plum sat on the rickety chair, thought seriously about crying, but decided that laughter was probably the only thing that would save her sanity. She allowed the—only slightly hysterical—giggles to build up inside her, her lips twitching as she asked, “Did you give the cheese to a mouse? A rat? An orphaned vole?”

Thom peeked at her from under her lashes, an affecting look Plum had never been able to master since her eyelashes, like her brows, were thick and seemed to have a mind of their own. “There was this adorable little monkey—”

“Thomasine Laurel Fraser!” Plum gasped in between unladylike snorts of laughter. “To give away your meager luncheon is bad enough, but to make up a falsehood of such magnitude is going too far.”

“It's not a falsehood, there really was a monkey. He was with a very old man, so bent and frail he looked as if he would be blown over by a strong wind. He was very charming, however, and told me his name was Palmerston, and his monkey was named Manny. They both looked in such a poor way, I gave him a bit of cheese, and a few other things that I thought you wouldn't mind…”

“At least you have the grace to look ashamed at such a bald-faced lie,” Plum said, her lips still twitching. “It's a good thing Mr. Haversham wishes to marry quickly, else I think you'd give the cottage away.” She gave in and had a good long laugh. By the time she was finished and mopping up her eyes, Thom had tucked the baby mice away on an old worn cloth, and was standing next to her, watching her warily.

“I'm sorry, Aunt Plum, I know it was wrong of me, but Mr. Palmerston and Manny looked in such need of a little kindness, and he did give me something in return.”

“Oh?” Plum allowed one last giggle to express itself, then schooled her lips into a more seemly position. “What did he give you? Certainly not any coin?”

“No, he gave me some advice.”

A ripple of amusement shook her for a moment, but she kept it under control. She had a suspicion that if she gave in to it, she'd end up witless and giddy. Or rather,
more
witless and giddy, since she was fast approaching that state. Perhaps it was hunger that was unhinging her mind. Perhaps if she had eaten something earlier, she wouldn't now be giggling at the thought of her niece giving away the last of their stores to a beggar who offered advice in return. “How very gracious of him. What advice did he give you?”

“Oh, it wasn't advice for me, it was for you.”

Plum raised both brows as Thom served up two bowls of soup. “For me? Why would he offer advice for me? How did he know who I was?”

“Evidently he stopped in town.”

Thom kept her gaze on her soup, a small mercy since Plum still felt sick to her stomach whenever she thought of the townspeople cackling over her past. That the news had spread like wildfire was not surprising, but what made her furious was the way Thom was made to suffer for her ignorance and Charles's cruelty. She didn't mind—much—them ostracizing her, but the drubbing Thom had taken the last few days was untenable. Her conscience rubbing her raw, she fought the desire to immediately pen a note to her intended, informing him of her history and breaking their betrothal. “What's done is done. I will tell Mr. Haversham the truth after we're married. It's a matter of self-preservation, not selfishness. I simply have no other choice, and it's not as if he will be losing out—I will be a devoted wife and mother.”

“Of course you will,” Thom said, just as if Plum were making sense, which she sadly acknowledged to herself as not necessarily true. “You'll be a wonderful wife and mother, and I completely agree with you that you're not being selfish.”

“Mmm.” Plum firmly told her conscience to take a holiday for the next two days, and picked up her spoon. “What was the advice the beggar had for me?”

“He wasn't a beggar; he seemed quite well-spoken, although he was rather dusty.”

Plum glanced up and caught the look of curiosity her niece was bending upon her.

“He said that sometimes that which you've thought is lost, is found, and what you think you have, has vanished.”

Plum blinked for a moment, wondering if it was the lack of food that made Thom's words seem incomprehensible, or if the old man's advice was supposed to have some meaning for her. “Well, that was very nice of him, although it doesn't make the slightest bit of sense, but I do appreciate the fact that he didn't say something in reference to his…er…cods.”

They ate in companionable silence for a few minutes, the heavy drone of bees on the wisteria that hung next to the window the only noise. Plum wrestled with a variety of emotions—anger, fear, and a general all-purpose worry—as she spooned up the last of the soup.

“Aunt Plum?”

Plum dragged her mind from the painful contemplation of just how she was going to explain to Harry about her past. “Hmm?”

Thom stood with their soup bowls before the wash bucket, twisting a threadbare linen between her hands, her brow wrinkled in a frown. “You're not marrying this Mr. Haversham on my behalf, are you? Because if you are, I wish you wouldn't. I know I'm not of much use to you, but I—”

Plum gave in to the need to hug the younger woman. “No,” she said, patting Thom's cheek. “I'm not martyring myself for you, if that's what you think. Mr. Haversham is a very nice man, I could tell that at once. He is a gentleman. He has a library. He wants children. And even if he isn't wonderfully handsome, I like his face. His eyes are particularly nice, an attractive hazel that seems to change color. And the rest of him is”—a warmth tingled pleasantly within her as she remembered his large, strong hands with their long fingers. She had always had a fondness for a man's hands, seeing in them a mixture of strength and gentleness that never failed to intrigue her—“just as pleasant. Does that put your mind at rest that I'm not marrying solely to put food in our bellies?”

Thom smiled, then leaned forward to kiss Plum's cheek. “I hope you will be very happy, Aunt. You deserve a good life. When do you marry?”

“In two days, if Mr. Haversham is able to obtain a special license.” Plum turned and surveyed the small room with its two cots, two chairs, one table, and a collection of broken baskets that Thom had fixed up as beds for her animals. “What do you say, Thom, are you willing to give up all this in order to live in a home that doesn't leak whenever it rains, or allow the cold in during the winter?”

Thom smiled and divided up the last of her soup between the cats' bowls and the goat's bucket. “It will be a strain, but I will suffer in silence as best I can.”

Plum laughed again, and in a moment of pure whimsy, threw out her arms and spun around in a circle. “A family, Thom! At last, at very long last, I'm going to have a husband and children of my own! Life just cannot get any better!”

Plum sat stunned to the point of silence as a maidservant combed out her long black hair. The thought of it rattled around in her mind like a pea in an empty bowl. She had a maidservant, someone who would comb her hair whenever she so desired. Her husband had provided her the maidservant. She had a husband and a maidservant. And a room of her own. Her eyes looked away from the up-and-down motion of the comb as it slid through her hair, and gazed again with wonder at the reflection of the room behind her, a lovely soft rose-colored room that smelled faintly of fresh paint, with a huge fireplace, a fainting couch, and a bed with rose and dark red bed curtains.

The maid's hand flashed white in the mirror.

“No one has combed my hair for me since I was twenty.”

“Is that so, my lady?”

That was another thing, she was a lady. Not that she had behaved in any other manner, for no matter how poor she had been, Plum had ever acted as a lady should—with the regrettable, if extremely satisfying, exception of the pot and Mr. Snaffle's cods—but now, as her husband of five hours had informed her earlier, she was also a lady in title. Lady Rosse, to be exact. Harry turned out to be a marquis in disguise; therefore, she was a marchioness.

A
fraudulent
marchioness, her guilty conscience whispered.

“No. It is too much. I just cannot take it all in,” Plum protested to her reflection. “The husband and the maid and the rose-colored room, yes, that I am willing to accept, nay embrace wholeheartedly with a great deal of happiness and pleasure if not outright ecstasy, but the rest of it, I just cannot absorb. It will have to wait for another time, a time when I can think about it without wanting to scream.”

Edna the maid carefully set down the silver comb and stepped slowly away from Plum. “Why would you be wanting to scream, my lady?”

There they were again, those two words.
My
lady
. She had deceived a marquis, led him to believe she was a poor but honest woman. Well, truly, she
was
poor but honest, honest with the exception of neglecting to tell him about one minor little fact… Plum moaned softly and leaned forward until her forehead rested in her hands. “Edna, would you happen to know if it's a hanging offense to deceive a marquis?”

“Erm…” Edna backed toward the door. “Will you be needing anything else, my lady?”

Plum tilted her chin up and spread her fingers so she could see the maid in the mirror. “Yes, please. Would you mind terribly not calling me
my
lady
? It makes me a bit uncomfortable, not as uncomfortable as I deserve, to be sure, but uncomfortable enough that I flinch, and one can only do so much flinching before one starts to twitch, and it's a short path from twitching to utter and complete madness. Do you understand?”

“Eep,” said Edna, and with eyes as big as saucers, she slipped out the door, closing it softly behind her.

“Well, now you've done it,” Plum told her reflection, “you've frightened your maid. She probably thinks you are already mad. She's probably right. Stupid, stupid Plum. What am I going to do? How am I ever going to tell Harry—a marquis, for heaven's sake, he's almost royalty—the truth about me?” Plum looked away to the door connecting her bedchamber to her husband's, giving it a righteous glare. “Although I don't know why I should feel guilty about this. After all, it's his fault, it's all his fault. If he had
told
me before we were married who he really was, then I would have told him who I…who I…oh, pooh. I don't know what I would have told him.”

Plum rose from the small gilt dressing table and fidgeted with the ribbon on her night rail. It was an old night rail, patched and mended and somewhat frayed on the bottom, not at all the sort of night rail a real marchioness would wear, especially on her wedding night, but it was all she owned, and she was pathetically grateful that Edna had found a rose-colored ribbon to replace the bit of braided cloth that had previously graced the neckline. “You are a coward, Frederica Pelham. You are nothing but a base coward, and you have no right to whine about anything because this is what you wanted.”

The scent of jasmine carried on a warm evening breeze hung heavy on the air as she gazed out the window at the blackness beyond. Because they had arrived after dark, she hadn't had much more than a glimpse of Ashleigh Court as Harry had brought her home, but what she had seen stunned her almost as much as the carelessly tossed-out fact that he, Harry, her lord and master, was in fact a lord if not her master. True, the house and grounds were horribly ill-kept, but Harry had reassured Thom (Plum being at the time too stunned by the marquis's revelation to do much but sputter, “But, but…”) that he had plans to renovate and rejuvenate the once-proud estate, and he looked forward to the help and advice of his new wife.

“A wife who doesn't deserve to offer any advice or help,” Plum said sadly to herself.

“You think not? I'm of another mind. I've always felt that a home needed a woman's touch to keep it from being too utilitarian.” Harry strolled into the room through the connecting door, clad in a heavy gold brocade dressing gown that reached to his feet. He stopped next to her and looked out the window, sighing as he did. “There's so much to do here, I would appreciate your help, but if you'd prefer not to take the house in hand—”

“Oh, no, I'd be happy to…my lord.”

Harry smiled as he turned to face her, a smile that would seem to be made up of mundane things like lips and eyes and adorable little crinkle laugh lines, but the sum result of it was so astoundingly wondrous, it melted all of Plum's internal organs. Or that's what it felt like. She couldn't believe that simply by standing beside her he had whipped her traitorous, not-in-the-least-bit-sorry-she-had-married-him-despite-the-fact-that-she-hadn't-told-him-the-truth-about-her-past body into a frenzy of want, need, and unbridled anticipation.

She had been far, far too long without a man in her bed.

“Are you still having difficulty with the marchioness idea? I am very sorry I didn't tell you before we married, Plum. It wasn't well done of me at all, but you see, I thought it might scare you off, and”—he took her hand, his thumb stroking over the backs of her fingers in a way that set alight all of the previously melted internal bits—“I wanted very much to have you legally mine before I bared my breast of all my secrets.”

A warm puddle of happiness did much to soothe her guilt. If he wanted her so much, perhaps the incident in her past would mean nothing to him? She hoped so. She prayed so. She also prayed she would survive the look of mingled desire and admiration that glowed from behind his spectacles. Plum had seen just such a look in the eyes of her first husband, and although it pleased her then, now she found herself responding to it with so great an enthusiasm, she thought her legs were going to give out. “It was a bit of a surprise, my lord—”

“Harry, please.”

“—Harry, but I can assure you it wouldn't have sent me screaming into the night had you told me before we were wed. Indeed, the fact that you were baring your secrets to me might have induced me to bare a few of my own.”

“Would it?” Harry said, his gaze dropping to the thin lawn of her night rail where it covered her breasts, breasts that were brazenly pushing themselves forward and clamoring for her to walk them into his hands. “And what secrets could a woman such as you have to bare?”

It was the word
bare
in combination with the avid way he eyed her breasts that sent the few wits remaining her flying straight out of her head. “Oh…I'm sure I have some…”

“Yes, yes you do have some. You have lovely some.” Harry's eyes glittered brightly as he looked at her breasts.

Plum frowned down at them, unsure whether she should affect maidenly mortification about the fact that her nipples were hard little pebbles against the soft linen, clearly outlined, right there for anyone to see, or to indulge in the wanton thrill of knowing Harry could stir such a reaction in her as to set her ablaze with the need to rub herself all over him. She decided that although the maidenly route was probably for the best, wanton was closer to her true nature. At least she could be an honest wanton. She took a step closer to him. “I assure you I have secrets, Harry. In particular, I have one secret. I was married—”

The words dried up on her lips as he—still staring at her breasts much in the manner of a starving man deposited at a feast—spread the fingers of his left hand and gently cupped her right breast.

“Yes, you told me you were married, and if you will recall, I told you that your past was of no concern to me.”

A tremor of heat rippled through Plum, starting at her breast and ending at her womanly parts, which were now tingling for all they were worth. She closed her eyes and shuddered with pleasure, her back arching of its own accord, pressing her breast hard against his hand.

“Are you cold?” Harry asked hoarsely.

She opened her eyes as he rubbed his thumb across her aching nipple. “No. Not cold. Hot. Very hot.”

“Hot, yes, so hot, I can feel your heat. I wonder if your other—” Plum moaned as he placed his right hand on her other breast. “You are very hot. Feverish, almost. I believe the best thing for you would to be freed of the restriction of clothing.”

“Do you think so? Do you think that might help my…fever?” Plum ignored the fact that she was babbling like an idiot, too overwhelmed with desire and lust and a variety of other emotions all related somehow to the wonderful tingling going on in her breasts and nether parts.

“I do, I do indeed believe it will help. As your husband, it is my duty to see to your welfare, thus I must demand that for the purpose of your continued good health, you remove your night rail.”

What a wonderful man! How thoughtful he was! How concerned he was for her health. “Oh,” she breathed, thoroughly enjoying how her breasts moved against the palms of his hands.

Harry's eyes widened behind his spectacles. “NOW!”

“Oh!”

His hands still warm on her breasts, he leaned forward, his hair brushing her jaw as he kissed a hot trail along her collarbone, down to the top of the night rail where the pretty rose ribbon held the garment up. She breathed in the scent of him, part lemon shaving soap, part something earthy and arousing, and entirely male that was solely Harry.

“I will be happy to assist you if you are unable to disrobe by yourself.”

Plum looked down to where Harry was pulling away from her, one end of the ribbon clenched firmly in his teeth. “This is wicked, you know, utterly and wholly wicked. We have only known each other for two days, and we're about to…you want to…and I would dearly love to…in bed. Together. With all our bare skin showing!”

The ribbon fell from his mouth as he looked up, a grin so endearing on his face, she wanted to grab his ears and kiss him until his spectacles fogged up. “Yes, I know, it is wicked, isn't it? Delightfully so.”

The bright glint in his eye slowly darkened with a shadow of doubt as he took a step backward. “You do want to do this, don't you? I'm not rushing you? I meant to tell you that I wanted a wife who desired a physical relationship, but at the time…er…I…eh…and today, when you said you had been married, I assumed that you'd want to…uh…”

Plum smiled a wry little smile as her breasts, heavy and hard and greatly missing his touch, pushed themselves with eagerness back into his hands. “Yes, I very much want to be a wife to you in all ways. It's just that I have only been with my first husband, you see, and we were together only for six weeks—”

Harry gently kissed the words from her lips. “You don't have much experience, I understand completely. You need not be worried on that account—we will discover this new territory together.”

Plum was about to object to the ridiculous idea he had about her sexual naivety when his mouth closed upon hers, driving all thoughts but those of a carnal nature from her mind. His mouth was sweet and hot and filled her with the need to taste him. Without waiting for an invitation or even permission, she slid her tongue into his mouth, capturing his delighted moan, pressing herself against him in an attempt to get closer. His hands slid from her breasts to her back, one tangling itself in her hair, the other grasping her behind, pulling her hips tight against him. Even through the heavy brocade of his dressing gown she could feel how aroused he was. His tongue twined around hers in a motion remarkably similar to the sinuous grind of his hips. She slipped both hands around his neck, pressing herself tighter against him, clutching his hair as she mapped out the terrain of his mouth, wanting to burn up with the heat he generated deep within her, needing to burn bright, unable to stop until she had merged with him, joined with him, his heat feeding her flames—

“Papa, Ratty is asleep and won't wake up.”

Plum thought she was hallucinating for a moment, but the way Harry stiffened against her alerted her to the fact that she hadn't imagined the childish voice behind her. With much regret, she separated from him, turning to face the small child who stood in the doorway to Harry's room, a limp brown object held carefully in his hands. He eyed her with bright curiosity. “Who's she? Is she going to be my new mama?”

Mama? As in…
mama
? Plum blinked in surprise.

“Er…yes. My dear, this is McTavish, my son.”

He had a son? And he hadn't told her? Plum shook the cobwebs of astonishment from her mind, and smiled at the towheaded boy. “Hello, McTavish, I'm very pleased to meet you. Yes, I am going to be your mama. What's that you have?”

The boy pushed the brown object into her hands. “It's Ratty. He's asleep. He won't wake up.”

Plum, no stranger to rodents after having lived with an animal-obsessed Thom for the past few years, did not shriek or object to the obviously dead rat she found herself holding. In fact, she was rather proud of how quickly she had assimilated the information that Harry had a child he had forgotten to mention during his secret-baring. She moved quickly to step into the role of mama to his sweet, motherless child. “I'm afraid Ratty has been called to heaven by the angels, McTavish. Do you see how his chest isn't moving? That means he's not breathing. I'm very sorry. Ratty looks like he was a good companion.”