How To Bed A Baron (2 page)

Whatever he saw there did not make him falter, as nothing ever had in all his life. If she had ever met a man more steady than Arthur Farleigh, she could not now recall him.

              “Of course I will help you,” he said, not asking what help she needed, assuming that whatever it was, he could handle it. Instead he seemed focused on an altogether different thought. “I must insist, before you tell me your tale of woe, that you eat.”

              Serena did not even blink but stared back at him as a good English dinner of beef and barley soup was brought to her, with more good bread and sweet butter. The stew was steaming, as was the white loaf, which Arthur set himself to buttering industriously. She thought at first that facing down M. Galliard had made him hungry, but she soon realized that all that bread, as well as the contents of the soup tureen, were for her.

              She felt tears come into her eyes that not only would Arthur defend her to a stranger without question, but that he would feed her into the bargain. Why simple kindness and unyielding courtesy were such shocks to her system, Serena could not say. She had been too long abroad, perhaps, fending off the advances of Frenchmen and Italians alike. Or perhaps she simply had forgotten how Arthur was.

It had been a long ten years.

              “I am glad to see you well,” Arthur said, as if discussing the weather, as if they had only parted yesterday. “I had heard that you and Sir Chester were abroad throughout the duration of the war, studying antiquities. I hope to find him well, when next we meet.”

              “My father died three months ago,” Serena said.

              She had repeated those words, or some very like them, so often since she had lost him that they had almost become commonplace. She explained her situation to everyone she met who found it odd that a woman would be traveling alone, that a woman of her class and rank had not even a maid to look after her. She never explained to these judgmental, if well meaning, people that she had cared for her father and run his dig for almost a decade, and that she had no need of a maid, or of anyone else. Often she said nothing at all. The black armband she wore usually said enough. But it was hidden beneath her cloak. She shrugged off her black wool, so that Arthur might see it.

              “I am sorry for your loss,” Arthur said.

              He did not speak again, but took her hand in his. The heat of his palm and fingertips filtered through her cotton gloves, giving her a feeling of warmth, and of coming home. She looked into his eyes and wished for a moment that she might go back home once more, indeed, that she had never left. Such wishes were foolish, however. One could not step twice into the same river.

              Serena took her hand back, drew off her gloves, and applied herself with vigor to her stew and bread. Arthur leaned against the wall behind him and watched her eat, meditatively munching on his own bread and butter. He finally remembered his beer, which had been refilled, and drank some of it. Serena drank a bit of her own, grateful for the hundredth time in two days that she was home in England, with good plain food that anyone of sense might eat.

              “Do you need help in settling your father’s estate?” Arthur asked.

              For all his ingrained politeness, Arthur had always come straight to the point.

              “No,” she answered. “Well, yes. In a way. I need to get onto the grounds of Oxford. I need to see Professor Gillingham at Magdalen College.”

              “Of course,” Arthur said. “I took a first in literature at Queens College. It would be my honor to escort you.”

              Serena finished her stew, not quite able to believe that she had come so far, and was so close to her goal. She blinked away tears again, for they had begun to form like threatening rain. She chastised herself for weakness, when she felt his hand on hers. This time, the warmth of his palm was not buffered by the cotton of her glove. This time, she felt the heat of his touch all the way down to her toes, and she shivered.

              She wondered, and not for the first time, what her life might have been like if she had stayed in England instead of traipsing off to parts unknown with her father. She might have four children by now. She might have married this man.

              The oddness of the thought kept pace only with the oddness of the moment, for once again it seemed as if Arthur, her old friend and one time confidant could read her mind.

              “I have a favor to ask of you as well,” he said.

              Serena did not blink but raised one brow, waiting for his request, wondering if he wanted her to pass the salt cellar, perhaps, which was close to her elbow on the table.

              When it came, his request was not for the salt. Nor was it even in the form of a question. His blue eyes did not turn from hers, which was the only way she was certain that he was not having a go at her, that indeed, Arthur, Baron Farleigh, was quite serious, as he so often was.

              “I need you to marry me.”

Chapter 3

Arthur knew with absolute certainty that he had made an ass of himself. He cleared his throat, and began again.

              “Perhaps I should have said, I need you to pose as my betrothed, if only for a few days. My mother thinks I’m engaged, and I want to tell her gently that I am not.”

              Serena pursed her full lips in thought, too polite to tell him that he was being a fool.  There was a time when she would have laughed out loud at that bit of nonsense. After ten years apart, she had perhaps grown a bit more pensive, or at least a touch more controlled, for she did not speak right away, but sipped her beer.

              “May I ask what has happened to your actual fiancée?”

              “She deserted me on the road to Gretna Green.”

              Serena raised one elegant brow but as he knew it would not, her elegance did not last long. She set the tankard down on the wooden table with a resounding thwack that made a woman at a nearby table jump. Serene stared at him, heedless of the good English beer that had sloshed out over her hand.

              “The trollop.” His old friend did not soften her words or her glance as she glared at him, as if he, and not Miss Catherine Middlebrook, had somehow offended. “Was she possessed by madness?”

              Arthur tried to repress a smile, but failed. Suddenly, the humiliating incident that had sent him to this public house in the first place took on a sheen of comedy. “No. The lady was carried off by a mad Scotsman.”

              Serena almost rose to her feet when she heard that, pushing back from the bench. “God’s teeth! A mad Scot, in Oxford? We must call the magistrate at once, and see what can be done. How far do you think they have gone? And why in the name of God are you sitting here, listening to me, when your future wife has been absconded with?”

              Serena was about to leave him flat and call for the innkeeper to send for the militia, no doubt, when Arthur caught her hand in his. At his touch, she stopped cold, her torrent of words drying up.

              “She was in love with the man, Serena. She left me because she loved another.”

              She sat down again, and blinked, looking for all the world as if he had struck her between the eyes with a mallet. “Some woman left you for a blinking Scotsman?”

              Arthur could not repress his smile, for she sounded so shocked, as if she could not fathom how any woman, anywhere on Earth, might prefer another to him. “She did.”

              Serena settled back on her bench, still blinking. “She was a trollop and a madwoman then.”

              “She is a lady,” Arthur said. “I fear I cannot have you name her as anything else in my presence.”

              “The devil with that!” Serena blazed anew, this time at him. “I’ll call her anything I please, and to her face, if she has the mischance ever to meet me in the street. I will call her out, and run her through for you.”

              Arthur found himself laughing then, feeling for the first time that perhaps he had been saved by that mad Scot from a mistake he would have regretted for the rest of his life.

              “Calm yourself, Serena. Please do not call her out on my account. She has no affinity for swords or pistols and would simply cry. Then her Scot would meet you in her stead, and then I would have to kill him, if I could, and we would all come to ruin.”

              Serena listened to the Gothic tale he spun as if he was talking the plainest of sense. She nodded, and drank her beer down in one long draught, in an attempt to cool her temper, he supposed. She finished it, but did not call for another. She looked at him and took his hand in hers. For some reason, he felt shored up by her touch, as if he were not alone in the world, as he had always been. As he had always been alone, since she went away.

              “Did you love her, Arthur?”

              He thought for a long moment, listening to the leanings of his heart. He never did such a thing, not since his father had died, for the heart seldom led where one might follow. He did so now, only because she asked it of him. For once, for blessed once, his heart did not show him pain.

              “No,” he answered. “I did not love her. She needed rescuing, and I wanted to save her.”

              “You are a white knight still.” Serena looked at him, unwavering, her frank green gaze taking him in as it had when they were small, and discussing important things, like where to cast their fishing lines in the river. She did not smile. “She was a fool to leave you, whatever her reason.”

              “The heart wants what it wants, or so I have read.”

              Serena’s generous lips quirked in a half smile, and he found himself staring at the plush line of them, wanting to lean close and taste her.

              She did not seem to feel the same bolt of heat as he did, coming out of the clear blue sky to couple with his hopeless love for her. She treated him like a friend, just as she had always done, and patted his hand. “Tell me you have not been reading Byron.”

              He laughed out loud at that. “Indeed. I have not.”

              “Well, thank God for that,” she said. “Death improved him, if you ask me.”

              “You met him then?”

              “Only the once, when he passed through Parma on his way to Rome. My father was invited to a dinner held in his honor, and I was forced to attend.”

              Something dark in her eyes made Arthur want to reach for a sword, though, of course, he did not wear one. “What did the bastard do?”

              “Nothing he hasn’t tried with a thousand other women, and succeeded with most of them, if his own tales can be believed.”

              “I would kill him twice,” Arthur said, pressing his hand down onto the wood of the table until a splinter wedged sharp in his palm. The pain did not make him see reason, however, only her voice did that.

              “There is no need. I sorted him out,” Serena said, suddenly looking away, as if she might find something more interesting to discuss from her perusal of the tap room.

Arthur would not let her avoid him but tugged on the sleeve of her gown. Fury had stolen the power of speech from him, it seemed, at least temporarily, but she must have felt his urgency along her arm, for she faced him again.

Arthur finally found his voice. “How did you sort him?” He wondered if she had perhaps pushed the offending gentleman into a convenient fountain, as Italy was said to be full of such. But then she smiled.

“I pushed my knee with great industry into a certain part of his anatomy that he valued.”

Arthur laughed out loud at that, surprised to find himself given over to mirth twice in the space of ten minutes, with a bout of fury tucked in between. His heart warmed in her presence, as his skin turned pink in sunlight. Arthur could not remember when he had experienced such piercing emotions, and so many, all in one day. He was usually a calm man, a measured man who found amusements aplenty, but never passion.

He looked into the deep green of her eyes, caught in her smile, and knew that his heart was in for a great deal more pain before Serena left him again. He did not shrink from her, though, or from the future he knew was coming. Instead, he caught her hand, and kissed it, surprising her into silence just when she had opened her mouth to speak again.

“Come, Serena. I will take you where you need to go. Which is…?”

“Magdalen College,” she repeated, sounding a bit breathless. He held her hand tighter, and wondered if he saw the hint of a blush rise along her cheeks. He could not be sure, and he reminded himself that gentlemen did not stare, nor did they discommode ladies. But Arthur heeded neither stricture, but watched her close.