How To Bed A Baron (3 page)

She was blushing, and the sudden color in her cheeks only made her more beautiful.

“And after we have your needs seen to, and your father’s legacy sorted, you’ll come home with me.”

Chapter 4

Serena could not quite believe that it was her old friend Arthur staring at her across the table as if she were a tasty treat he could not wait to devour. She wondered why on Earth he did not simply tell his mother his girl had bolted, and start looking for a new wife. Why she needed to be dragged into his shenanigans, and into the radius of Lady Sara, a woman not easily fooled, Serena could not say.

Unless the heat in his eyes was the reason.

For a moment, Serena found herself wondering where that heat might lead, if she and Arthur spent the night in his mother’s house.

              Serena fought with the desire rising in her own blood, a strange bit of madness that she had never before experienced. She had never been tempted to stay with a man even for an evening, all those years she spent in Italy with only her elderly father standing as guard over her virtue.

She was no green girl. She had lost her innocence to an Italian in Siena who had claimed to be a displaced prince, but who thankfully traveled on to parts unknown the next morning. It had been a moment of weakness, a foolish indulgence of curiosity, which fortunately had borne no fruit and caused her no shame, save for her private shame at being a fool.

Serena had learned at a very young age not to allow a man to stare at her with desire in his eyes. Always in the past, save with the self-proclaimed prince, she had nipped the nonsense in the bud with a strong set down. But now, with Arthur, she did nothing of the sort. She let the unwelcome, unavoidable swell of her own desire cloud her reason, the heat of his hand on hers.

              When a woman was tall, well-endowed and bore hair as red as a fiery blaze, she either embraced the life of a courtesan or spent her life fighting off unwanted advances. If she was clever and quick, she avoided situations in which she might be accosted, in which strong set downs, say with the edge of one’s knee, must be given. She wore plain, ugly, serviceable gowns of gray and brown, and kept to digging in the dirt, and to maintaining the camp her father had set up for the gathering his bits of the past. Archeology was a dirty business, and not just because men like M. Galliard skulked about, always looking for something to loot. It was not a glamorous occupation, and it did not attract the romantic sort. She reminded herself that she was not in the least romantic. But still, she let Arthur hold her hand.

              She realized that they had been sitting there for several minutes at that point, with only heat and silence between them. She cleared her throat, and tried to draw her mind back to the problem of getting her father’s legacy into safe hands before the sun had set. She would sort out the rest of her life after that.

              She realized that she wanted nothing so much as to accept Arthur’s offer, at least for the night. She had nowhere else to go. And she was desperately tired of being alone.

              Arthur Farleigh waited patiently for her to come to the conclusion he had already reached. When she did, he must have read her answer in her eyes. He did not speak but smiled at her, and drew a ring out of his pocket. It was a silver ring, holding three small, delicate pearls. Serena had never seen anything so lovely in her life.

              Her old friend, his passion tamped down for the moment, slipped it onto her finger without ceremony. “Thank you for helping me.”

              Serena knew she was lost when she did not argue with him. She did not take the ring off, nor did she point out the obvious fact that it was he who was helping her.

“You’re welcome.”

Arthur stared at his mother’s ring on Serena’s hand. The daughter of a baronet, she once would have been a suitable match for him. Long before her father dragged her off to Italy in the middle of a war to dig for buried treasure. He looked into her face and wondered if his mother would accept her now, if he found the nerve to marry her in earnest.

              He pushed all such thoughts from his mind as soon as they entered in. He was not a green boy, to follow after fancies. He was a man of thirty, who needed an heir. He could no more marry Serena, a twenty-eight year old woman of little fortune and antiquated connections, than he might fly to the moon on a cloud. Even if such a goddess might have accepted him. Which this one decidedly would not.

              Even in her ugly gray gown, Serena Davenport gleamed like a gem on velvet. An emerald set in rose gold, perhaps. Her skin was as soft as the day they had parted, her cheeks no longer rounded with girlhood but high. Her green eyes were the same slanted cat’s eyes they had always been, but now they seemed to take him in and measure him with thoughts he no longer knew. This woman had been his best friend once, and now she was a stranger.

              A beautiful stranger, one he wished he knew a good deal better.

              Arthur chastised himself for his ungentlemanly thoughts, even as he stood, the picture of decorum, and offered her his arm. “May I see you to my carriage, Serena? We must be off to Oxford before the hour grows much later.”

              She stared up at him, and placed her hand in his without drawing on her gloves first. He could feel the supple softness of her fingers in his own, and as she stood, wrapping her cape around her, he took in the scent of cinnamon.

              “Serena,” he said, after he had nodded to his man to pay the tab. “You can’t possibly have been baking.”

              She laughed aloud at that. “I never bake. Anything I touch in the kitchen burns to ash.”

              “You smell of cinnamon,” he said bluntly, wondering if his manners had wandered off with his wits in tow. She did not take offense, but smiled as he escorted her out of the tap room.

              “It is a special unction I acquired in Italy,” she said. “It is a combination of orange oil and cinnamon that is said to have once warded off the plague.”

              “Has there been a new outbreak of the Black Death in Tuscany of which I am unaware?” Arthur asked, handing her into the carriage. She had put her gloves back on between the table and the door, but he could still feel the heat of her palm when she touched him. It made him want to strip her gloves off, and run his hand up her arm, beneath the tight sleeve of her gown.

              She laughed again, a dark, vibrant sound that made him want to kiss her. Instead, he adjusted the line of his cuffs, and did his level best to make himself attend to what she was saying.

“No, indeed,” she answered, as the coach and four left the inn yard. “We are fortunate that no such thing has happened. Though God knows there are plenty of modern plagues to scourge us. I wear the oil in the hopes of warding off disease. My father’s man in Parma swore by it.”

              Arthur nodded sagely, as if he actually gave such superstition credence. “Indeed. An Italian servant is always a man to be heeded.”

              Serena swatted his forearm. “I follow the strictures of the locals wherever I go. Honey and garlic are good for healing as well.”

              “I had no idea you were such a fountain of peasant knowledge.”

              “Peasants know a great deal, Arthur.”

              He was not certain he agreed, but he would not argue the point. The warmth of her body was tucked close beside him in the carriage, as she had not bothered to sit in the forward-facing seat across from him. She always did the unconventional, most unexpected thing. Arthur knew that he should rise and sit across from her himself, but with the scent of cinnamon claiming his senses and the soft wool of her cloak brushing his hand, he simply could not do it.

              The ride to Magdalen College was not a long one, for which he was thankful. He schooled himself to impassive calm, reminding himself that, as a gentleman, he could not take advantage of a lady in distress. With her father dead and strange Frenchmen dodging her steps, Serena qualified as a woman in need. He would keep his own nascent desires to himself, even if it killed him.

              Which it very well might.

***             

Serena was very happy when the coach finally stopped.

              Unlike most of the mind numbing, body breaking journey she had endured getting home to England after ten years away, the last leg of the odyssey to Oxford University was warm, comfortable, ensconced in the velvet and polished oak of Arthur’s traveling chaise. And beside her, sitting too close for her peace was Arthur himself, larger than she remembered, and unfortunately, just as honorable.

              She thought of all the bastards whose company she had been forced to endure as her father struggled to keep the dig going when his own money had been cut off from him behind the enemy lines of the ongoing war. She remembered the gropes she had just barely managed to dodge, the smug smiles, the assumption that for a fee, the pleasures of her body came along with the pleasure of working with her father.

              Serena had sworn to herself that once she was home, back among the civilized men of Oxfordshire, she would live in her father’s house, or rent it out and find a small cottage of her own, where she might live out her days in quiet, called on only by the local spinsters, the occasional widow and perhaps the vicar’s wife. She promised herself that she would never have to endure the unwanted touch of a man again.

              And now, safe in Oxfordshire, safe beside the one man on Earth who would rather die than offer her insult, the one man alive who would kill any man who did so, Serena wanted nothing more than to feel the touch of his hand on her arm.

              And elsewhere.

              Serena cursed herself, and as the carriage rolled to a smooth stop outside the antiquities library of Magdalen College, she told herself not to be a fool.

              She gathered what was left of her wits and her pride and leaned down to take up the bag she had carried all the way from Parma, only to find it in Arthur’s grip.

              He smiled at her and climbed out of the carriage, handing her down to the paving stones as if she were made of spun glass, as if she were a precious thing. Serena’s hand itched for the worn strap of the bag that held her father’s legacy, but it was heavy, and Arthur lifted it easily. If she could trust him with her virtue, she could trust him with this.

              “Thank you, Arthur.”

              He quirked a brow at her as he had when they were children, looking bemused if not outright amused. “No need to thank me, Serena. I would carry you much farther, and at much greater trouble to myself and my people, than Magdalen College on a sunny day in June.”

              Serena took his arm then, and watched as he dealt deftly with each man they met. Gatekeeper after gatekeeper fell away, as they never would have for her, until she found herself at long last in the center of a book filled room, the kind of room in which she would have lived out her life, had she been born a man. Her father’s old friend, Professor Gillingham, stared with bemusement at the broken down satchel set on the oak table between them. She remembered then that bemusement was how Gillingham looked at the world.

              “Professor,” Serena began. But she did not finish, for the old man came around the polished oak table to take her in his arms.

              “I am so sorry, Serena. So sorry for your loss.”

              She felt tears rise to blind her and to block her throat. She swallowed convulsively in a vain effort to control herself, but two tears escaped anyway. This man had never doubted her father’s ability or his work. This man had written to them long after the rest of the College stopped, until the lines of communication had been cut completely by Napoleon’s stranglehold on Italy.

              “Thank you,” she managed to say.

              “You stood by him, as no one else did, as no one else could. He loved you more than anything in this world. I want you to know that.”

              Gillingham peered at her from behind rimless spectacles, the blue of his eyes two points of light that, instead of making her want to weep, gave her strength. She took a deep breath, and released it slowly, straightening her back.

              “Thank you, Professor. He loved you, too.”

              His father’s old schoolmate waived one hand, suddenly embarrassed. She watched as he turned to ring the bell, no doubt to bring in a porter with tea and scones. She stopped him by opening the satchel that stood on the table between them, and taking out the piece her father had given all his adult life, and all of her youth, to acquire.

              Professor Gillingham froze, his hand on the bell pull, and watched as she unwrapped the statue, first from its oilcloth, and then from its layers of gauze, until it was completely unveiled.