An Extraordinary Flirtation (16 page)

Nick turned his head in a vain attempt to escape the dog’s caress. “I don’t know what the devil you’ve been reading, but the damned book should be banned. Take your elbow out of my ribs!”

Zoe obliged, but only so that she might take further liberties with Nick’s person. Daisy, having thoroughly washed his left cheek, moved on to investigate his eyebrow. He could stop neither of them. The marquess sprawled upon the stairs like a man crucified. Beau strolled into the hallway, and stopped, and stared.

The master of the household was up earlier than once had been his habit; he had hardly any reason to pursue certain evening activities these days. Beau had already bathed and shaved and breakfasted, perused the newspaper and pondered the latest follies of the ministry; had read a political essay as well as accounts of recent social events, cockfights and a boxing match; had lingered over advertisements for wives, lottery tickets, and an intriguing patent nostrum guaranteed to revive manly vigor, the name of which he had carefully noted. It was with the notion of tracking down this miracle medicine that he had entered the hallway, expecting to have Widdle fetch his hat and walking stick. That Widdle wasn’t in the hallway was hardly surprising, since the butler was seldom where one might expect him to be. What
was
surprising was the excessively bizarre
ménage a trios
being enacted on the stairway. Cara’s dog, Beau recognized, and his own daughter, and— The devil, was that
Mannering?

Here was a fine thing! Beau had heard his daughter shriek, and the dog barking, but since neither circumstance was unusual, he had thought it merely part of their current game. A game that had taken an unexpected turn. “Zoe! This isn’t what I meant by bringing him up to scratch!”

Nick didn’t like the sound of “up to scratch.” He pushed feebly at the dog. “Loversall. I wish to talk to you about—”

“Me!” Zoe sighed as her papa grabbed her arm and hauled her upright. “But it is for naught, alas, because I’m too young to wed.”

Beau was having none of this nonsense, not after the exhibition he’d just witnessed. “You’re nothing of the sort. Daisy, remove yourself from the marquess. Now!”

Daisy gave Nick’s face one last slobber, then flopped off him and onto the stair. Zoe pouted. “You said—”

“I’ve said a lot of things that later turned out to be cork-brained.” Beau watched Lord Mannering wince as he attempted to sit up. “It’s the devil getting older, isn’t it? You should have known better than to attempt the business on the stair! I haven’t done such a thing myself for—” He paused to consider how long it had been, and then recalled with whom Mannering had been going about the business. “You will make restitution for this, my lord.”

Nick achieved a sitting position, and paused. His back hurt like Hades, and his head wasn’t far behind. “I didn’t—”

Beau extended his hand and pulled the marquess to his feet. “No, but you would have. I know a compromising situation when I see one. If I hadn’t walked in when I did, you’d have had her up against the wall.”

A brief silence ensued while Beau contemplated the last time he had had a lady up against a wall (which had been far longer ago than he liked), and Nick considered the same matter (only a few hours past, in his case), and Zoe pondered the mechanics of the thing. “Gracious! I don’t know that I would care for that. It sounds most uncomfortable. Shall I walk on your back, Lord Mannering? I do it for Beau when he gets in a knot.”

Nick had already been considerably closer to Zoe than he cared to be today, or ever. “No!” he said, and frowned at Beau. “Restitution for what?”

Beau folded his arms across his chest and attempted to look stern. “You’ve besmirched my daughter’s reputation. Now you must make amends.”

He
was cast as the piece’s villain? Nick drew in an indignant breath, and winced. “Your daughter has damn near broke my back. You should be grateful that I don’t sue you. Indeed, I
may
sue you. That girl is an affliction, a misery, a blight! You should have drowned her at birth.”

Drowned
her? “Well!” huffed Zoe, more than a little bit dismayed to find her True Love so poor-spirited. Or if not her True Love, then the gentleman with whom she had decided to Experience Life. Perhaps she should have instead chosen a viscount or perhaps a Hussar, but definitely not the knight, for he was even more ancient than Lord Mannering. “He has insulted me, Beau! Are you going to fight a duel?”

Beau wasn’t
that
cork-brained. Mannering was a crack shot, and he looked at the moment as if he could cheerfully dispatch any number of people without a second thought. “No, puss. I’m going to see you safely wed.”

Nick started to protest. Zoe spoke first. “But I was only flirting!” she wailed.

Beau was not at all pleased to see this further evidence of the family nature in his daughter. “This is what comes of that sort of thing, my girl.”

Her beloved papa speaking to her as if she were a stranger! It surpassed belief. It also surpassed all patience, and Zoe flew into a tantrum, shrieking at the top of her lungs and flinging things about. Since there was so little furniture in the hallway, she had to content herself with hurling the chairs and decapitating the umbrella stand, kicking over and shattering the large urn that stood at the foot of the stair. Then she threw herself on the floor, kicking and flailing her feet and arms about. Daisy, thinking this a grand new game, and the best one yet, leapt into the fray, took Zoe ‘s skirt between her teeth, and dragged her around the hallway. Zoe disliked this development. Her face turned bright red. She shrieked one last time, and began to hold her breath.

Beau lowered his hands from his ears, where he had placed them during the worst of Zoe ‘s histrionics, and turned to the startled marquess. “It’s almost over now. She’ll either decide to breathe again, or turn blue or swoon.”

The sooner the chit swooned, the better. If she stopped breathing altogether, it would be better yet. “I didn’t come here to ask for your daughter’s hand,” Nick said.

“Can’t say as I blame you,” Beau admitted. “Still, I saw what I saw—speaking of hands and where they were and where they shouldn’t have been!—and you’ll marry her, my lord. Because you wouldn’t like
what
the world would say of you if it became known that you ruined a lass’s reputation and then turned your back on her, I think.”

Do unto others...
Nick pondered his own recent use of blackmail. “I hardly ruined her. She threw herself on me—

“I didn’t!” protested Zoe , from her position on the floor.

Beau ignored her. So did Nick. “And I had no choice but to defend myself. You know, at some point in time, you should probably have turned her over your knee. Or locked her in her room.” Or even better, pitched her off the roof.

Beau looked at his daughter, who was regaining her normal color, now that she had decided to again breathe. It might well be true that she had initiated matters, but the marquess would marry her nonetheless, because someone clearly had to marry her, and soon. Perhaps Mannering would be able to keep her in line. Although the episode on the stairway suggested otherwise. But then there was the title. And the extensive Mannering fortune. Beau could do far worse for his only chick.

Nick disliked that contemplative expression. “No one saw but you,” he pointed out. “Your daughter misunderstood my purpose in coming here. I wished to talk to you about something else altogether. Perhaps we might just forget that this unfortunate incident ever took place.”

Unfortunate incident? Too long ignored, Zoe got up from the floor. Lord Mannering didn’t sound a bit like a man whose heart was engaged, which put her on her mettle, because if she was going to break his heart— which he richly deserved, pretending to not want to kiss her—then she must engage it first. When she
did
get around to breaking his heart, ‘twould be all the more satisfying if the whole world knew she had brought London’s most determined bachelor to heel before she had crushed him flat beneath her boot. And in the meantime she would be a marchioness.

Beau hadn’t stopped talking. “Do you deny trying to entice my daughter into a squalid little intrigue?”

Not Beau’s daughter, but his sister. And there had been nothing squalid about it. Nick touched the painful lump that was forming on the back of his head. “I do.”

Beau knew more than a little about intrigues himself. He was beginning to suspect that his daughter also knew more about them than she should. “Nonetheless, you’ll marry her, my lord.”

Zoe tripped gracefully across the floor to slip her aim through Nick’s. He attempted to remove it. She dug in her fingernails and smiled beatifically. “I shall become your marchioness with pleasure, Lord Mannering,” she said, just as Widdle returned to the hallway with the other members of the family, and Lord Mannering’s visiting card.

Both ladies gazed upon the scene with astonishment. “I see Zoe has been in her tantrums again.” Ianthe sighed, as she knelt down to pick up the pieces of her prized vase. Daisy ran to her mistress, who stood still as a stone.

“I’ll get you another!” said Beau, before Ianthe could start moaning over the damned vase. “More importantly, Mannering has come to make Zoe a declaration. She has accepted. With my blessing, of course.”

Ianthe sank back on her heels and looked astonished. “In the front hallway?”

“He could wait no longer,” Zoe said smugly, already half believing the fiction herself. “Passion overwhelmed us both, and he swept me right off my feet.”

Lord Mannering might still have protested, had indeed parted his lips to speak; but then he saw the contemptuous expression on Lady Norwood’s lovely face, and his jaw snapped shut.

Baron Fitzrichard was not unfamiliar with the great old mansion so appreciated by members of the Mannering family who wished to seclude themselves from the world. However, he had never before visited the master bedchamber, where massive beams supported the ceiling, and tapestries featuring a procession of lions and dragons and unicorns marched across the walls, and bright rugs gleamed on the polished wooden floor. Chests and chairs were scattered about the room, along with various oddities, including ancient books, and a foot rule, and a gaily colored feathered fan. In one corner stood an ancient and somewhat battered suit of armor known fondly to the family as Ferdinand.

Scarlet velvet draperies adorned the square-paned windows and the enormous canopied four-poster bed. “You can’t say I didn’t warn you, Nicky!” Fitz said, as he regarded its occupant. “And you should have listened to me, because it’s plain as the nose on your face that I knew what I was talking about.”

The nose on Lord Mannering’s face was not plain at that moment, but buried in a pillow, for he was sprawled on his bed while Jacob rubbed a balsam containing white Spanish soap, opium, rectified spirits of wine, and camphor on his abused back. In addition to these measures, a fomentation of white poppy heads, elder flowers, and water had been applied to the lump on his head; and Mary had rushed to the apothecary for a draught composed of liquid laudanum, cinnamon water, and common syrup, which should prove marvelously efficacious if one subscribed to the dictum that the worse a medicine tasted the greater its curative powers. No matter how severe his discomfort, however, the marquess was adamant about not ingesting anything containing horses’ hooves or wood lice, and furthermore had refused to let himself be cupped.

As result of all these measures—in particular the opium, poppy heads, and laudanum—Nick was not feeling as poorly as he had when he arrived here. “That will be sufficient abuse for the moment, Jacob,” he muttered, into the pillow. Jacob replaced the lid on the jar of balsam and withdrew.

Fitz ventured further into the chamber and hauled a velvet-upholstered chair closer to the bed. “Insanity in the family,” he continued. “I suspected as much, and now I’m sure. You
do
want to be leg-shackled. You must! Although I’d think being leg-shackled to the little Loversall would be a fate worse than death.”

Nick gritted his teeth, rolled over on his back, and groaned. As result of the ministrations of his faithful servants, the pain in his head had settled down to aching dully like an abscessed tooth, unless he tried to move. His back, however, still felt as if some great unseen beast had sunk in its fangs and refused to let go. “I
don’t
want to get leg-shackled,” he ground out. “And I’m not
going
to get leg-shackled. I just haven’t said so yet.”

Fitz waved a lavender-scented handkerchief beneath his nose to combat the scent of camphor wafting from the bedstead. “The notice has already been sent to the
Gazette! You
told me so yourself.”

Nick painfully pulled himself to a semi-sitting position. “I don’t give a damn about the
Gazette.”

Fitz studied his friend over the lace edge of his handkerchief. The marquess looked positively decadent, propped up amidst his pillows in the ancient bed, wearing nothing more than a sheet draped casually across his lower half. Fitz felt drab in comparison, for Nicky’s summons had interrupted his toilette, as result of which he was wearing the plainest of his waistcoats. Furthermore, there had been no time to tie his cravat in anything more intricate than the Mail Coach, which could be found gracing the necks of stage coachmen and guards, swells and ruffians alike; and he still had whiskers on his chin.

Considering the urgency of that summons, Fitz had at the very least expected to find Nicky on his deathbed, and was somewhat annoyed to discover he was not. “I thought you was supposed to be a regular out and outer! Here I leave you alone for a minute and you land in the suds. Why did you go and do such a beetle-headed thing as enter that house alone? Why
did
you go there, by the by? And at so uncivilized an hour?”

Nick wondered what had prompted him to desire Fitz’s companionship in this, his hour of need. “I wanted to speak with Beau.”

Despite his fondness for colored neck-cloths and the like, the baron was no greenhead. He fluttered the handkerchief. “But not, I’ll wager, about Miss Zoe.”