Betina Krahn (17 page)

“It’s just as well you didn’t,” Antonia said hoarsely, turning her face away from Eleanor, inspecting the rug behind her. Her lips felt hot and conspicuous. “I was just checking on his lordship’s progress.” She tossed him a turbulent look that she prayed would pass for indignation. “Be sure to keep him busy, Eleanor. Remember: idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”

And idle lips are the devil’s playground, she realized as she sagged against the wall in the stairwell moments later. The proof was the way her lips were on fire this very moment. The wretch had done it again: caught her alone, cozened and tempted and kissed her to the ends of her endurance. Her heart was racing and her whole body was trembling. What was it about Remington Carr that seized her senses and turned her into a witless, libidinous creature bent on possessing his mouth?

Once more, by the barest of margins, she had been saved from his baser impulses. And her own. As she recovered enough to proceed up the stairs to the small downstairs
parlor, the thinness of that margin of safety became humiliating. He kissed her and had taken unthinkable liberties with her person. Sweet heaven—she could still feel the heat of his hands on her waist and rising up her back!

She picked up her lap desk and carried it to the window seat, jamming it onto her lap when she was seated, pinning herself in place. A few calming breaths later, she told herself that she was at least making progress. He wasn’t as snappish and irritable as he had been at first. Perhaps her ladies were beginning to get to him. If she could just keep her distance and keep her wits about her, there was every reason to believe she might win her wager and change his abominable attitudes toward women. Twelve days … they had twelve days yet to go. Suddenly that seemed like forever.

Remington helped carry the rugs back to their respective places, trying to behave as if nothing had happened. But it felt as if a great deal had happened, and he wasn’t sure he understood it all. For the second time in as many days, he had had her in his arms and had kissed her within an inch of her soul. And for the second time he felt rattled and hungry and unaccountably disturbed. What in blazes was wrong with him?

Standing there with her in his arms, feeling her softness against him, and tasting her ripe-cherry mouth, he had felt something slipping inside him, something nameless and worrisome. It felt like control and it had nothing to do with mere events. His stomach slid lower, toward the source of that feeling—his loins.

The fact that he was slipping deeper and deeper into lust for the woman who was his sworn enemy alarmed him. But a moment later he was vindicated by the thought that he hadn’t been the only one warmed and willing. Her arms around him and her sighs of pleasure had said she too was affected by their kiss. A wave of cool, restoring reason
poured through him. He was making definite progress here.

No more of this ridiculous trepidation, he decided as he washed for supper. At the very first opportunity Antonia Paxton was going to find herself on her back, being loved to the very end of her soul. And she was damn well going to like it.

That night Remington dragged himself through his front door in much the same condition he had been in the previous night: frazzled, aching, and weary to the marrow of his bones. Phipps and Manley took one look at him, poured him a killer draft of brandy, and steered him straight into a steaming bath.

When he came out of the tiled bathing room into his ornate Louis XIV bedchamber, Uncle Paddington was sitting on the armless divan, smoking his briarwood pipe and looking grave indeed. In his hand was a folded newspaper, and from the look on the old boy’s face, Remington knew it had to be a copy of
Gaflinger’s
.

“What’s got into you, Remington?” Paddington Carr demanded, removing the pipe from his mouth. “Wearing corsets, and making wagers with women, and doing female labor …” He looked indignant in the extreme. “What next? A blistering case of housemaid’s knees?”

“It’s a wager. A trifle,” Remington declared, shrugging and mopping his brow with the towel hanging about his neck. “Nothing for you to be concerned about.”

“It is very much my concern.” Paddington tossed the paper aside and raised an admonishing finger. “Never said much about your yen for strange politics … that female emancipation, and other such nonsense. But things have finally got out of hand. As your father’s brother, I feel obliged to step in and do a father’s duty by you.” Rotund,
ruddy-cheeked Uncle Paddington pushed to his feet and stood with his arms crossed over his ample chest.

“See here, my boy, it is your duty to preserve both the family name and the family dignity. It’s high time you gave up this wretched shilly-shallying and settled down … married and established a nursery.” He shook a finger again. “You need an heir, my boy. Nothing like begetting heirs to steady and settle a fellow.”

“To
strangle
a fellow,” Remington said into his towel as he wiped his face.

“What was that?” his uncle said, scowling.

“I said I’ll get around to ‘steady and settled’ soon enough,” Remington declared, louder and more sharply than he intended.

“Better not wait too long,” Uncle Paddington said sagely, clamping his pipe back between his teeth and letting his gaze and thoughts drift. “All the good women will be snapped up. I should know, my boy. Happened to me. While I was dillydallying, the one true love of my life up and married another. Never found a woman half so pretty or clever or sweet-natured, ever again.” His voice and attention trailed off, as they often did, into events long stored in his mind.

Remington watched the old boy’s shoulders round and felt a painful surge of protectiveness toward him. Disappointed in love and living a life overshadowed by regret, the Carr men seemed to have an exceptionally bad time of it with women. His father had had too many, his uncle too few. And
he
had had—

“A nursery.” Uncle Paddington roused enough to look at Remington with a smile that bore traces of transitory bewilderment and sadness. “Always liked babies. Never had any offshoots myself … you were the closest to it. Dem frisky little thing. Keen as a whip-crack. Used to make me your hobbledy horse, y’know.” He crossed that narrow
boundary into reason’s twilight again. “Little blighter … you wrecked several of my best cravats. Never could stay angry with you, though. Still always tiptoed into the nursery at night … to hear your prayers.…”

Remington’s jaw clamped fiercely against the hot tide of feeling surging into his chest. In those precarious days Uncle Paddington had been far more of a father to him than his own self-absorbed and pleasure-seeking sire. He had no intention of spoiling the old boy’s dreams with the nasty jolt of his loathing for marriage. But shortly, Paddington himself roused to burst that fragile bubble of memory. He straightened, focused both his gaze and his mind once more, and leveled a firm look at Remington.

“Babies require women. What we need to do, my boy, is get you a wife.”

Remington groaned.

The story of Remington and Antonia’s wager appeared in no less than nine newspapers the next morning, including
The Times
. Fully two thirds of London awakened to accounts of the wager, which were grandly embellished and embroidered—not the least of which was an imaginative description of Remington’s newly discovered aptitude for swinging a rug beater. One enterprising news writer had apparently scaled a neighboring fence to look down into the service yard for that scoop.

From peers to shopkeepers, from household domestics to Liberal Party leaders, London tongues were awag with the juicy details of the earl’s latest outrage. And since
The Times
was one of two papers the queen permitted in her personal residence, the tale was soon rattling boxes there as well.

Anyone who knew the aging Victoria knew that the years had not dulled the sharpness of her ears any more
than it had her tongue or her stubborn will. When she saw her daughters whispering over the paper that morning in her Buckingham House sitting room, she demanded to know what had them in a tither. Under her formidable gaze they read the article aloud.

As the wager and its noteworthy participants were unfolded before her, she stilled, scowled, and reddened ominously. She sat for a moment after the reading was finished, smoothing the black silk of her gown with a methodical hand.

“Landon … that hideous scapegrace,” she announced her opinion with a billow of royal and righteous ire. “The man has no sense of decency, morality, or duty. He’s a perfect example of what comes of too much education. We have always said all that intense brain work is unhealthy. It turns a man inward, makes him amoral and selfish.” She pushed up from her chair and began to pace.

“Worse yet, he’s giving the old and honorable title of ‘Landon’ a royal drubbing. It’s unconscionable, unpardonable.” She paused halfway back from the window. “What was the name of the lady again?”

Princess Beatrice glanced back at the newspaper. “Lady Antonia Paxton, Mama.”

“Paxton? Yes, we remember it. A most honorable name. It was Sir John Paxton who built our Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition.”

“It says here she is the widow of Sir
Geoffrey
Paxton,” Beatrice offered.

“Widow?” The queen’s plump face knotted briefly with concentration, then eased. “Ah, yes. The late Sir Geoffrey’s wife. We thought the name sounded familiar. She is on the board of the Widows’ Assistance League. A fine woman, we are given to think.” She straightened her rounded shoulders and drew herself up to her full height. “If anyone can teach him the value of hearth and home, she can. Let us
lend her our good thoughts and the sustenance of our own personal high regard.” Her eyes narrowed and her chin raised regally. “And let us pray she shows the wretch no mercy.”

“What’s happened? What’s the matter, Auntie?” Antonia rushed into Hermione’s darkened room that same morning, and straight to the armless settee on which the old lady reclined. She turned with a questioning look to Prudence Quimby, who sat nearby. “Is she all right?”

“I’m fine, Toni dear,” Hermione answered for herself. “Or at least I will be when I rid myself of this merciless headache.” She looked up with eyes that seemed frightfully worn and delicate.

Anxiety washed through Antonia. “Are you certain?” she said, reaching for the old lady’s cool, dry hand and settling onto the edge of the fainting couch beside her. “I could send for Dr. Bigelow.”

“That silly man?” Hermione harumphed softly. “He’d just give me one of his pacifying herbals and tell me to loosen my stays. No, my dear, you needn’t fret. I shall be fine.” She patted Antonia’s hand as it rested on her own, then recalled something. “Oh, but his lordship—I was to tutor him in menu planning this afternoon!” The thought clearly distressed her as much as her malady did.

“Don’t worry, Auntie, I’ll see to it. I’ll—” She bit her lip and thought of whom she could get to replace Aunt Hermione. There was no one else. “I’ll just have to do it myself.” She tucked a knitted coverlet around Hermione and then tiptoed out.

As the door clicked shut, Hermione’s eyes popped open and she raised up onto one elbow. “Well,” she said, meeting Prudence’s conspiratorial smile with one of her own, “that wasn’t too difficult.”

Silence fell over the sunlit dining room as old Hoskins shuffled out, carrying the last tray of breakfast dishes back to the kitchen. Antonia straightened a small stack of papers on the dining table, then picked them up and arranged and rearranged them, waiting for Remington to arrive.

She had not counted on having to deal with him at close range. All evening and well into the night she had been haunted by the memory of their kiss yesterday in the service yard, and by her unprecedented paralysis in the face of his size and potent male heat. She had just stood there, letting him kiss her, unable either to rebuff him or to retreat, suffering all sorts of wild and pleasurable physical sensations and thinking all manner of dangerous thoughts. About kisses and intimate touches … and about what other pleasures they could lead to.

She hadn’t thought about kisses and caresses in a very long time, and had
never
spent time thinking about the deeper and more intimate pleasures they sometimes preceded. She had kissed and been caressed before. She was a widow, after all. But she had never actually anticipated it,
longed
for it!

“Here I am, as instructed,” he declared, startling her. She whirled and found him standing in the doorway with his arms crossed and his head tilted at a provocative angle.

“I didn’t hear the front door,” she said, blushing and pressing a hand delicately across her pounding heart.

“That’s because I didn’t use it. There was a ravening pack of newshounds outside again, so I came down the alley and in through the kitchen door.”

“Very enterprising of you.”

“I have always been a rather enterprising fellow,” he said, glancing at the papers on the table. “And just what is it I am supposed to learn this morning?”

“The rudiments of menu planning,” she said, lifting her
chin and fixing her gaze on the door frame beside him. She intended to claim and retain control here. “If you’ll recall, we felt it important that you understand something of the effort and skill required in planning meals. So this morning I will endeavor to show you—”

“You? I thought someone else was to tutor me, that you only oversaw the process,” he said, invading her vision as he leaned a shoulder against the doorjamb. When she glanced up at his face, he was giving her that insinuating smile that always generated such annoyance in her.

“My aunt Hermione is not feeling well. I am merely taking her place.” She pointed to a chair at the end of the table. “Please be seated and we’ll begin.”

He strolled slowly forward, spurning the chair she had assigned him, and came to stand face-to-face with her. “I prefer not to sit, thank you. I always think better on my feet.”

Precisely what she was afraid of, she thought as he loomed beside her. “Suit yourself,” she said, snatching up her stack of papers and spreading them across the tabletop as a pretext for putting distance between her and him.