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‘I suppose...’ she began, on a flood of remorse. But was prevented from making another apology by the return to the room of the landlord and a waiter. Between them they’d brought all the items Lord Rawcliffe had requested. Not that he acknowledged them. He just stood there, with his back to the room, in stony silence while the men set everything on the table.
While she stood by the door, shifting from one foot to the other.
Why were they taking so long to set out a few dishes? Why couldn’t they take the hint that both she and Lord Rawcliffe wanted them to go away?
Because, even though it was highly improper to remain in the room with only Lord Rawcliffe for company, she had too much pride to make her apology to him in front of witnesses.
And too highly developed a conscience to leave without making it.
Chapter Three (#ub35c94aa-1c44-506f-963e-9e8d40b169c0)
‘You had better remove your gloves,’ he said, once the landlord and the waiter had bowed their way backward out of the room.
‘My gloves? Why? I am not staying. My coach is due in any moment and I—’
With an expression of impatience he strode across the room and seized her wrist. ‘You need to get some ice on your hand,’ he said, wrenching the buttons undone and tugging at her fingers.
Oh, good heavens. He was removing an item of her clothing. True, it was only a glove and he was doing it as though she were a naughty child, but still it was making her insides go all gooey.
Until something he said jolted her out of that pathetic state.
‘Ice?’ The bowl of ice he’d ordered, while he was standing there staunching the blood flowing from his nose, was for her hand? She’d assumed it was for his nose.
‘Yes, ice,’ he repeated, drawing her over to the table. ‘It is the best thing for injuries sustained when boxing,’ he said, thrusting her on to a chair. ‘I know how painful it must be.’ He took some chunks of ice and wrapped them in one of the cloths the waiter had brought. ‘It is just fortunate that your hand connected with my nose, rather than my jaw, at which,’ he said as he placed the cloth over her knuckles and held it there, ‘I believe you were aiming.’
‘Are you saying you deliberately moved your face so that it was your nose I struck, rather than your jaw?’
He shrugged one shoulder. ‘You don’t seriously think you could have landed a blow unless I permitted it, do you?’
‘Well, now you come to mention it, I was a bit surprised you didn’t try to block me.’
He gave her one of those withering looks that made people say he was insufferably arrogant.
‘There are a lot of little bones in the hand,’ he said, looking at hers as he dabbed at it with the napkin full of ice. ‘And not one of them, as you should know, as strong as the jawbone.’
‘What do you mean, as I should know?’ Did he think she went round punching people on a regular basis? And had he really, deliberately, put his nose in the way of her fist, rather than letting her injure herself on him?
‘Judges 15, of course,’ he replied scathingly. ‘How do you think Samuel managed to slay all those Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, if it wasn’t harder than all their skulls?’
Oh, that was more like him. To quote scripture at her in order to make her feel stupid. And yet...he was taking care of her. Tending so gently to her hand, which did hurt rather a lot. When never, as far back as she could recall, had anyone ever tended to any of her hurts.
She had always been the one tending to others. She’d started learning to care for her brothers, and her father, well before Mama had died and left the task of running the bustling vicarage entirely in her ten-year-old hands.
‘There,’ he said, giving her hand one last gentle pat. ‘Does that feel better?’
She nodded. Because she couldn’t have spoken even if she’d been able to think of the right words to describe how she felt. The ice did indeed feel soothing. But the fact that he’d sent for it, that he’d made it into a compress, that he was applying it...that was what was bringing a lump to her throat.
Oh, this was why Lord Rawcliffe was so dangerous. Why she’d always stayed well away from him. Because he made her want things she had no right to want. Feel things she had no right to feel.
Eventually she pulled herself together sufficiently to lift her chin and look straight into his face, and even give him a tremulous smile.
‘Thank you for tending to my hand. And accepting my apology. And...and even for dodging so that I got your nose rather than your jaw.’ She got to her feet. ‘But I really must be going now. My coach is due in any minute and—’
His face hardened.
‘I have not accepted your apology.’
‘What? But—’
‘Sit down,’ he said sternly. ‘You are not going anywhere until you have given me a full explanation. Besides, have you forgotten?’ He gave her a cold smile. ‘You are my fiancée. Do you really think I am going to permit you to go jauntering off all over the countryside, on your own?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. I am not your fiancée. And I don’t need your permission to do anything or go anywhere!’
‘That’s better,’ he said, leaning back in his chair, an infuriatingly satisfied smile playing about the lips that had so recently kissed her. ‘You were beginning to droop. Now you are on fighting form again, we can have a proper discussion.’
‘I don’t want to have a discussion with you,’ she said, barely managing to prevent herself from stamping her foot. ‘Besides, oh, listen, can’t you hear it?’ It was the sound of a guard blowing on his horn to announce the arrival of the stage. The stage she needed to get on. ‘I have a seat booked on that coach.’
‘Nevertheless,’ he said, striding over to the door and blocking her exit once again, ‘you will not be getting on it.’
‘Don’t be absurd. Of course I am going to get on it.’
‘You are mistaken. And if you don’t acquiesce to your fate, quietly, then I am going to have to take desperate measures.’
‘Oh, yes? And just what sort of measures,’ she said, marching up to him and planting her hands on her hips, ‘do you intend to take?’
He smiled. That wicked, knowing smile of his. Took her face in both hands. And kissed her.
‘Mmph,’ she protested, raising her hands to his chest to ward him off. He paid no attention. He just wrapped his arms round her and kept right on kissing her.
‘Mbrrrhgh!’ She wriggled in his hold. To no avail. His arms were like bars of iron. Besides, she wasn’t only fighting him. She was also having to fight the stupid, crazy urge to push herself up against him, to open her mouth and kiss him back.
And just as she was starting to forget exactly why she ought to be fighting him at all, he gentled the kiss. Gentled his hold. Changed the nature of his kiss from hard and masterful, to coaxing and...oh, his clever mouth. It knew just how to translate her fury into a sort of wild, pulsing ache. She ached all over. She began to tremble with what he was making her feel. Grew weaker by the second.
As if he knew her legs were on the verge of giving way, he scooped her up into his arms and carried her over to one of the upholstered chairs by the fire. Sat down without breaking his hold, so that she landed on his lap.
And instead of struggling to break free, she subsided on to his chest, burying her face in his neck. Because she could see absolutely no point in struggling to escape from the one place she’d always wanted to be: in his arms, the focus of his whole attention.
‘Now,’ he growled into the crown of her bonnet, ‘you will tell me why you are in this godforsaken spot, trying to get on a coach, when you should be snug and safe at home in the vicarage.’
‘The vicarage is not my home anymore, as you very well know,’ she said, jerking upright under the impact of a dose of that bleak truth. ‘Now that Father has died.’
‘The vicarage is your home,’ he said. ‘Even,’ he laid one finger to her lips when she took a breath to protest, ‘even when the vicar is no longer living. There was no need for you to leave, the moment you buried him.’
‘But the curate—’
‘The curate should have damn well contacted me before evicting you and presuming to move in, which is what I have to assume he did?’
‘Well, yes, but he did contact you. At least, I mean, he tried to. And when you didn’t respond, he—’ Well, everyone in Watling Minor believed that Lord Rawcliffe knew everything. Which meant that if he hadn’t responded in the negative, then he simply didn’t care what arrangements had been made for the late vicar’s daughter.
‘Assumed I would be happy to have you evicted?’ His eyes narrowed. ‘I shall have to have words with the Reverend Cobbet.’
‘No, no, it wasn’t like that.’ She laid one hand on his chest. ‘It wasn’t him. I just... There didn’t seem any point in me hanging on there. Not when Clement had arranged everything for me so...so...kindly.’
‘Clement? Kind?’
‘Yes, well, it was kind of him to go to so much trouble on my behalf.’ He’d told her so. ‘He didn’t have to make any arrangements.’ As Lord Rawcliffe raised one cynical eyebrow, Clare hastened to add, ‘I mean, I would have thought if anyone had the duty to provide for me it would have been Constantine.’
He made a scoffing noise, expressing his opinion of her oldest brother. Since it pretty much coincided with her own, after the way he’d behaved lately, she made no objection.
‘And what form did this kindness of Clement’s take, dare I ask?’
‘He found me work. A good, honest job. One I am well qualified to take up.’
‘You are going to be housekeeper for another family of ungrateful, lazy, hypocritical, sanctimonious prigs, are you?’
‘Don’t speak of my brothers like that.’
He closed his mouth. Gave her a look.
Which somehow had the effect of reminding her that she was still sitting on his lap, with her arms about his neck, though she couldn’t recall the moment she’d put them there. And that he was running his big hands up and down her back, as though to soothe her. And that, although she had just, out of habit, leapt to defend her brothers, right at this moment she couldn’t help agreeing with him. For she’d spent years keeping house for them. Then nursing their father, while they’d all left and got on with their own lives. But when she’d needed them, all they’d had to offer her were excuses. Constantine’s wife was due to give birth to their third child at any moment, he’d written, and couldn’t be expected to house an indigent sister. It was asking too much.
Cornelius had no room for her, either. Though, since he lived in bachelor quarters in the bishop’s palace she hadn’t really hoped for anything from him apart from sympathy. But even that had been in short supply. Instead of acknowledging how hard it was going to be for her to leave the vicarage, the only home she’d ever had, he had, instead, congratulated Clement on his foresight in arranging for her removal so swiftly, so that the curate, a man who had a wife and a baby on the way, could move out of the cramped cottage where he’d been living before. He’d even gone so far as to shake Reverend Cobbet by the hand and say how pleased he was for him to finally be moving into a house where he and his family would be comfortable.
It had felt as though he’d stabbed her in the back.
At which point in her bitter ruminations she heard the sound of wheels rattling across the cobbles.
‘Oh, the coach, the coach!’ Finally she did what she should have done in the first place—she made an attempt to get off his lap. But he tightened his hold, keeping her firmly in place.
‘Too late,’ he said smugly. ‘It has gone without you.’
‘But my luggage! Everything I own is in my trunk...’
‘Which has been conveyed to my chaise.’
‘What? How can you know that?’
‘Because I told the landlord to have it done when I ordered the tea and ice. Did you not hear?’ He widened his eyes as though in innocence, when he must know very well she had heard no such thing. That he must have mumbled it while she’d been busy getting the table in between them. Which had worked really well, hadn’t it? Since she’d somehow ended up not just in his arms, but also on his lap just the same.
‘Well, you shouldn’t have.’
‘Of course I should,’ he said with a touch of impatience. ‘If I hadn’t had the foresight to do so, you would have just lost everything you own.’
‘Instead of which, I have fallen into the hands of a...a... Why, you are so high-handed, ordering people about and...and forcing people into fake betrothals that you... Why, you are little better than a kidnapper!’
Chapter Four (#ub35c94aa-1c44-506f-963e-9e8d40b169c0)
Rawcliffe drew in a deep breath and started counting to ten.
Just as he got to two, he realised he wasn’t angry enough to need to resort to his usual method of dealing with Clare. He was still far too pleased with the ease with which he’d finally got her on to his lap, and into his arms, to care very much about what she had to say about it.
He smiled down into her furious little face.
‘Far from kidnapping you,’ he pointed out, ‘I have rescued you from the consequences of your own folly. However,’ he interjected swiftly when she drew a breath to object, ‘I concede you must have been at the end of your tether, to hit me when all I did was tease you the way I have always done.’
And it hadn’t hurt that much. Not as much as discovering she thought him capable of such casual cruelty that she’d ended up being evicted from her home before her father was even cold in his grave. When she’d said he’d gone, he’d just assumed she meant that he’d managed to get on to a coach when she wasn’t watching and that she was searching for him. Reverend Cottam’s behaviour had been getting increasingly erratic of late after all. And his sarcasm had been mainly aimed at her brothers, who’d left her with a burden she should no longer have to shoulder all on her own. He’d never dreamed the irascible old preacher could actually have died.
‘But you cannot deny,’ he continued when she drew her ginger brows together into a thwarted little frown, ‘that had I not announced you were my fiancée, you would have been ruined.’
‘I don’t see that it would have been as bad as that,’ she said, defiant to the last.
‘Johnny Bruton, the man who is a member of my club, is a dedicated gossip. He would have left no stone unturned in his quest to discover your name and station in life.’
She shifted on his lap, giving him a delicious experience of her softly rounded bottom.
‘That was why I instructed the landlord to have your belongings placed in my own chaise. So that he would not be able to read your luggage label with, no doubt, its destination thereon. Not for any nefarious notion of abduction.’
‘Well, if you’ve prevented him from discovering my name, there is no need to carry on with this deception, is there?’
Need? No, it wasn’t a question of need. But it was so deliciously satisfying to have the proud, pious little madam so completely at his mercy for once. True, she was still spitting insults at him, but they lacked the conviction they might have had if she wasn’t sitting on his lap. If she hadn’t put her arms round his neck instead of slapping his face when he’d kissed her.
Not only that, but she’d actually apologised to him. And thanked him, though the words had very nearly choked her as she’d forced them through her teeth.
Oh, no, he wasn’t finished with Clare just yet. There were just too many intriguing possibilities left to explore.
‘That depends,’ he said, as though considering her point of view.
‘On what?’
Hmmm. She’d stopped scowling. It was worth noting that pretending to be taking her opinion into account made her sheathe her claws. He would have to bear that in mind.
‘On where you were planning to go. I presume, to the home of your new employer?’
‘Yes, I told you, Clement arranged for me to begin work as a companion to an elderly lady.’
‘No, you didn’t tell me that.’
‘Oh. Well, he did. You see, he is involved in all sorts of charitable work. And one of his causes is to find honest work for...er...fallen women.’
Something like an alarm went off inside him. Because he’d just spent the better part of a month searching for a girl who might have criminal connections. A girl who’d disappeared after the elderly, vulnerable woman she’d been working for had been robbed. And Clement’s name had come up then, as well.
‘He finds work for fallen women, does he?’ He only just prevented himself from asking if he also found work for professional thieves. Just because he was on the trail of a group of criminals who’d been systematically robbing elderly ladies, it did not necessarily mean that Clare’s brother was behind it. It could be just a coincidence that one of the people he’d questioned had mentioned Clement Cottam’s name.
‘What sort of work? And, more to the point, how does this affect you?’ Because he couldn’t see Clement being fool enough to ask Clare to rob an elderly lady she was supposed to be looking after, even if he was involved in the crimes Rawcliffe was currently investigating. She was too conscientious. ‘Are you not insulted?’
‘No, no, he... It is just that he has a sort of network, I suppose, of elderly ladies with charitable dispositions, who are willing to give that sort of woman a chance to reform. At least, that is how he explained it to me when I couldn’t credit how swiftly he’d managed to find me a post.’
‘That does sound hard to credit,’ he agreed. So, Clement had a network of elderly ladies who would agree to take in servants with a shady past, on his recommendation, did he? Even though that could be a coincidence as well, two coincidences regarding a man he already suspected of being up to no good, coming in such rapid succession, were hard to ignore.
