The Gypsy Duchess (7 page)

As she watched, the figure on the bed moved restlessly, tossing his head from side to side and moaning a single, strangled word that sounded strangely like, “Moira.”

She sat perfectly still. Listening. There it was again. “Moira.” But now it was more a plea than a moan. She slipped from her chair, dropped her shawl, and padded barefoot across the thick Turkish rug to stand beside the bed.

His eyes were open but glazed with sleep and laudanum. “Moira,” he called, holding out his arms. “Come to me, my lovely siren.”

Moira held her breath. The Earl of Langley was dreaming…of her. She gazed down at the man who had dominated her own fantasies for the past four years, and her heart fluttered wildly in her chest to think he dreamed of her as well.

Dare she acquiesce to his demand?

A wicked imp whispered in her ear. “Whyever not? He is too deeply drugged to remember tomorrow what he asked or how you answered. Steal the kiss you have longed for. You may never have another chance—and what poor kind of gypsy are you that you cannot even steal your heart’s desire?”

“Devon, my love,” she whispered, bending over him and burying her fingers in the mass of fair hair fanned out across his pillow. She felt his strong arms enclose her, saw his lips part in hungry invitation, begging her own to supply the feast they craved. She could no more resist that invitation than she could forgo breathing. With a sigh, she covered his mouth with her own.

He responded instantly with the masterful, well-practiced technique of a man who had obviously known many women. Yet, unlike his punishing embrace of four years earlier, the touch of his lips this time was as exquisitely tender as the first, shy kiss of a young Abelard worshipping his Héloise.

He kissed her again, growling low in his throat—the rich, earthy sound of the aroused male animal that found an answering echo in the core of her femininity. Drawing her closer, he deepened the kiss into an act of intimacy far beyond the mere touching of lips that Moira had heretofore experienced.

One hand slid from around her back to cup her breast, and she gasped when the heat of his fingers burned through the thin fabric of her gown. “Take it off, sweet siren,” he whispered. “How can we make love with all this between us?”

“Hush my lord—my wicked, rakish
gaujo
lord,” Moira whispered back, feathering gentle kisses across his eyelids, which had drifted closed even as he spoke. “A man with a wound such as yours cannot think of making love.” She laughed softly. “And a good thing too, else we might both live to regret the temptations this night offers.”

“Then kiss me again, sweet siren,” he murmured. “Heal me with your tender passion.” He smiled seductively, but his hand fell slack against her breast and his breathing deepened until his chest rose and fell with the same long, slow rhythm as the waves washing against the base of the Cornish cliff on which White Oaks stood.

Moira kissed him one last time—softly, lingeringly on his firm lips, and a single, sorrowful tear trailed its lonely path down her cheek to splash against the corner of his mouth.

Smiling in his sleep, the Earl of Langley licked the salty morsel from his lips and swallowed it as he might swallow a drop of fine French brandy.

Devon woke to bright sunshine streaming through the open window near his bed. Apparently some careless servant had opened it to air the sickroom and forgotten to close it again—a dereliction of duty his mother would never have suffered, but he had a feeling the duchess took a much more casual attitude toward running a household than his persnickety parent.

Still he couldn’t complain. He had slept out in the open too often on the Peninsula to hold the usual fear of night air, and his head felt miraculously clear compared to how it usually felt after a laudanum-induced sleep. Even the pain in his leg had subsided to no more than a dull throb.

Also—he smiled to himself—the passionate dream he’d had this past night had ended far more satisfactorily than its frustrating predecessors, and that alone lifted his spirits.

He turned his head and met the stoic gaze of Ned Bridges, who sat in a chair a few feet from the bed. “Devil take it, Ned, are you still here? When do you ever sleep?”

“Slept like a log, as a matter of act, between midnight and near five this morning,” Ned said, with a cheerful grin. “And feel top o’ the trees for it.” He bustled around, laying out Devon’s razor and shaving soap, and looking, inexplicably, like the cat that had swallowed the cream. With a flourish, he swept the cover from a bowl of steaming hot water which sat on the bedside commode.

“It’s well past noon. Her grace will be coming soon to check on you no doubt and you’ll want to be looking your best,” he said, stropping the razor against the sturdy strip of Yorkshire leather he kept on hand for just that purpose. “Fine woman, that, for all her queer ideas—like opening the window so’s you’d wake with less of a headache from the laudanum. Swears she sleeps with her own window wide open summer or winter—and who ever heard such a claim as that from any but an old army campaigner?”

“Who indeed?” Devon studied his batman’s face. “Just when was it the duchess opened the window? I don’t recall her doing so when she visited yesterday afternoon.”

A dark flush spread across Ned’s rugged features. “Now that I think about it, she did pop in once while you was sleeping.”

“How long did she stay?”

“How long?” Ned applied himself diligently to working the soap into a foamy lather with the shaving brush. “Can’t say as how I looked at a clock, Captain.”

Devon pushed himself upright on his pillow and raised his chin so Ned could lather it. “Mayhap between midnight and five this morning, would you say?”

Ned gave a derisive grunt. “Is there nothing you can’t ferret out of me, Captain?”

“I hope not,” Devon said half in earnest.

Ned’s face bore a look of patient resignation. “It was like this. Her grace insisted I get some sleep. Said I looked like I’d been run down by a coach and four—and to tell the truth, I felt like it. But I’d never have left you without her promise she’d call me if you so much as turned over in bed.”

“I know that, Ned. I wasn’t questioning your loyalty,” Devon said absentmindedly. “In fact, I’m relieved someone spelled you for a few hours.”
But did that someone have to be the duchess?”

His mind awhirl, he tried to recall the details of the dream he’d found so enjoyable, for he was certain he must have dreamed it during the time she’d sat with him. Could that be why, for the first time, he’d gotten a good look at the siren’s face? In truth, even now he recalled every detail of every feature down to the tiny, provocative mole at the corner of her sensuous mouth. But then how could he not when in his dream he had kissed her so passionately?

There was no doubt about it. The siren of his dreams was the beautiful Moira, and, come to think of it, he hadn’t stopped at merely kissing her. His hands had cupped her exquisite breasts…shortly before he had demanded she remove her gown so he could make love to her.

Hell and damnation! He just hoped he hadn’t talked in his sleep, as Stamden claimed he was prone to do. The last thing he needed was for the beautiful little minx to realize he lusted after her the same as every other man who came within sight of her.

Moira debated long and hard before visiting the earl’s sickroom the afternoon after their nocturnal interlude. Ned Bridges had warned her, his employer had pried the truth out of him about her sitting with him during the night, and the dreadful thought occurred to her that the unscrupulous rake may not have been asleep after all when they’d shred those moments of passion. The thought was too disquieting to contemplate.

Still, she dared not neglect her duty as hostess, for if Devon St. Gwyre was as astute as both Ned and Elizabeth claimed, he would surely grow suspicious if she acted peculiar in any way. Better to proceed as if nothing untoward had transpired.

“You look much improved, my lord,” she said as she entered his room at teatime, followed by a maid carrying a heavily laden tea tray.

Did she just imagine it, or was that a speculative look in his eyes?

He was sitting up in bed reading, but he instantly put his book aside and favored her with a strained smile. “Ah, tea. How pleasant, your grace.”

If there was anything he hated more than tea, it was a woman with a smug expression on her face when she offered it. Hell’s fire, from the look of her, he must have babbled his brains out while she sat there all night and listened.

“Charles has been asking after you, my lord. Would it tire you too much if he visited you for a few moments? He has come through his frightening ordeal with amazing fortitude for one so young. The boy has pluck. Still, I cannot help but feel he would take comfort in your presence,” Moira said, pouring tea with hands whose trembling she could not seem to control.

She was no green girl fresh from the schoolroom, but neither was she a jaded sophisticate capable of carrying on a polite conversation with man who just a few hours earlier had had his hand on her breast and his tongue in her mouth. Devon St. Gwyre was turning her safe little world upside down. If she had to carry one end of the litter herself, she was packing him off to Langley Hall before the week was out. Maybe then she would get her wits in order.

“Seeing the boy will not tire me in the least; I have much to discuss with him, including this companion I understand you have procured for him,” Devon replied. “Send him to me if you will, tomorrow morning.”

Devil take it, she did have a tiny mole at the corner of her mouth, just as he’d dreamed. Now how could he have known that? And what would she think if she knew that his dream about her had been so lurid, that his mouth still tingled from the kiss they’d shared. The effect this woman had on him was too disturbing by half. If he had to be transported on a litter, he was leaving for Langley Hall before the week was out. It was either that or lose his mind entirely.

He pulled himself together. “I have much to discuss with you also before I leave White Oaks, madam,” he said severely. “We cannot go on in this willy-nilly fashion. Certain rules need to be established at the onset regarding the young duke’s guardianship. Rules which I shall expect you to adhere to without question.

W
illy-nilly! The Earl of Langley thought she was raising Charles in a “willy-nilly fashion,” did he? First he’d decreed she’d had no business leaving London without his permission, despite the danger to Charles in that sinkhole of crime and corruption; now he intended to establish rules to which she must “adhere without question.” She blushed to think she could ever have been so lost to reason as to have imagined she found such a pompous individual desirable.

Moira paced the length and breadth of the first-floor salon to which she had repaired after stalking out of his bedchamber, too angry to trust herself to address his accusations in a rational manner. How she regretted her emotional declaration when he’d first arrived that she had sadly misjudged him. It was obvious the only error she had made in judging the sorry fellow was not to allow that he was an even greater fool than he appeared.

But what could she hope to gain by arguing with him? She was at his mercy, as women were always at the mercy of men in the English social structure. Not that life with the Rom was any different. Her grandfather ruled his little band of gypsies with an iron hand and within each gypsy family, the man’s word was law, despite the fact that the woman who must obey that law was often far more intelligent than he.

Life was not fair! She gave a vicious kick to the nearest object at hand—a sturdy ottoman—too late remembering she was, as usual, barefoot. She was still hobbling about holding her bruised toe when she heard the clatter of horses’ hooves on the drive fronting the manor house.

She limped to the window, hoping to catch a first glimpse of the men she had summoned to guard Charles. But instead of the three men she expected to see, there were four—and the fourth was all too familiar. She groaned. Of all the people in the world she did not want to see right now, her ne’er-do-well father headed the list.

Moments later John Footman, who had been elevated to the station of butler in Chawleigh’s absence, announced the arrival of the honorable Squire Reardon and the brothers Keough.

“Honorable?” Moira gasped as her father clasped her in a bone-crushing hug. “Since when has there been anything honorable about you, you old reprobate? And how did you acquire the honorific of the landed gentry when you never stay in one spot long enough to acquire more land than the dust you carry on your boots?”

“Moira, me darlin’ girl, ‘tis glad I am to see you too.” Jack Reardon’s handsome, florid face was wreathed in a grin that spread from ear to ear. “And as to me new designation, I decided ‘twas only proper, with me daughter a high-and-mighty duchess.”

Moira disentangled herself from her exuberant parent’s embraced and surveyed him closely. From the elegant silver buttons on his moss-green riding jacket to the smooth fall of his buckskin breeches, he looked every inch the wealthy country squire he claimed to be. Even his usually unruly salt-and-pepper hair had been trimmed into a neat conservative style. “Well as least you’re dressed for the part you’re currently playing,” she admitted.

“Which is more than I can say for you, daughter.” His heavy black eyebrows drew together in a disapproving frown. “Since when have duchesses taken to going about barefoot and garbed in widow’s weeds so dowdy no self-respecting scrub woman would be seen in them?”

“Since I became a duchess, I imagine,” Moira said disinterestedly. “All the gowns aristocratic English women wear are so colorless and boring I cannot bring myself to prefer one over another.” She frowned. “But don’t tell me you’ve ridden all the way from Penryn to lecture me on my lack of fashion sense.”

“I’ve made the trip—and a hard ride it was, I might add—because the lads told me you’d called in your markers.” He indicated the three tall, redheaded men in rough country garb who waited in the hall outside the salon door, all of whom looked too much like John Footman to deny kinship. “If it’s trouble you have, lass, you should have sent for your old da’, not those sons of Satan.”

“My old da’ has been the cause of most of the trouble in my life and never yet, that I can remember, the solution,” Moira said dryly. “As a matter of fact, the greatest favor you can do me at the moment is to get back on your horse and ride away before my houseguest, the Earl of Langley, catches sight of you and begins snooping into my family background.”

“Langley is here? By all that’s holy, I thought the old codger had cocked up his toes years ago.”

“The old earl did die two years ago in a hunting accident. His son Devon is the present earl.

“Devon is it now? Lord, girl, I should think you’d have learned your lesson about consorting with Langley’s pups after that last bumblebroth.”

Moira limped to the nearest chair, where she clasped the back to balance herself while she massaged her aching toes. “I am not consorting with the earl,” she said irritably. “Far from it; we loathe each other. He is here on business—as Charles’s guardian.”

“Never say so!” Jack Reardon assumed a highly offended mien. “What was the old duke thinking of, giving over young Charlie’s affairs to a stranger. As his step-grandpapa, I should have been named the boy’s guardian.”

Moira laughed. “That would be the day! The duke may have been the best-hearted of men; he was never a hen-witted one. With you as guardian, Charles would be penniless by the time he reached his majority.”

“Mind your tongue, girl. Have you no shame, speakin’ to your father so disrespectful?” He beckoned to the waiting men. “Come on in, boys. I’ve had me usual tongue-lashing from this fishwife I sired.”

“And with good reason, I’ve no doubt, you old reprobate,” the tallest of the three redheads declared in a deep voice that reverberated like a giant cymbal throughout the small salon.

He stepped forward. “Michael Keough at your service, ma’am. And these two handsome fellows are my brothers Timothy and James. Young Johnnie here”—he gave John Footman a resounding clap on the back—“has told us a bit about this wicked fellow, the viscount. Will you be wanting him dead or just roughed up enough to put him off bothering you again?”

“Nothing like that,” Moira said quickly. “I just need you to act as the young duke’s bodyguards for a short time. At the rate Viscount Quentin is racking up debt, he’ll soon be in so deep with his creditors he’ll have to flee the country, and my troubles will be over.”

“Whatever you say, ma’am. For it’s God’s truth we owe you, and a Keough always pays his debts.” Michael Keough wrapped an arm around John Footman’s narrow shoulders. “If our young cousin here will show us where we’re to lay our heads down of a night, we’ll stow our belongings and look the place over to decide how best to go about this bodyguarding business.”

“Fair enough.” Moira smiled. “I was certain you would be just the men I needed”

She watched the men leave the room, then turned to her father with a frown. “I meant what I said, Blackjack. You cannot stay here right now. One whiff of scandal in my background and the earl will take Charles away from me just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “And I cannot let that happen because I love the boy as if he were my own. Not that I expect you to understand that.”

Blackjack Reardon raised an indignant eyebrow. “Would I not? Then why am I here in your time of trouble if not out of fatherly concern?”

“Most likely because your pockets are to let. You’ve not shown up on my doorstep for any other reason these past four years.”

Blackjack rolled his eyes dramatically. “Ah, Moira girl, it’s a cynic you’ve become since hobnobbing with the swells. “ ‘Twas nothing but the love in me heart that kept me rump glued to the saddle for close to twelve hours.”

His strong white teeth flashed in the wicked smile which for forty odd years had won him a place in the hearts and the beds of more women that he could remember. “However, since I’m here, I don’t mind admitting I am a wee bit short of the ready.”

“I thought so. What was it this time? Horses or women?”

“A bit of both actually. Not that any of it was my doing at all. ‘Twas simply the devil’s own happenstance. First I suffered a run of ruinous luck with the ponies; then I gave me protection to an undeserving wench who emptied me pockets while I slept and ran off with a traveling tinker.”

Moira couldn’t help but laugh. “A traveling tinker! Good Lord, Blackjack, you have landed in the dung heap this time. But don’t look to me for help. I’m at low tide myself right now. I settled up all my accounts before I left London, since I’ve no intention of ever returning to the miserable place—and my quarterly allowance from the duke’s estate is not due until April.”

“You paid off your creditors?” He shook his head in bewilderment. “What kind of foolishness is that? Don’t you know the titled gentry never pay their bills until they’re dunned; nor are they expected to? ‘Twould be the collapse of the entire British financial system should such a muzzy notion take hold. ‘Twas not at my knee you learned such heresy, nor that of your dear departed mother, for no self-respecting gypsy would consider payin’ for anything.”

“If you’re telling me my mixed blood leaves me neither fish nor fowl, you’re wasting your breath,” Moira said bitterly. “I had that bit of wisdom driven home to me before I took my first step.”

Blackjack drew himself up to his full, imposing height. “Well, you’ve not done too badly for a hedge bird, have you girl? And who do you have to thank for landin’ in the clover? Your old da’, that’s who. For without me you’d not have struck your fine bargain with the old duke.”

He scowled fiercely. “And like it or not, you’ll have to put up with me until you’ve the blunt to see me on my way. Or have your grown so heartless you’d send your old da’ to sleep beneath the haystacks like a common turnpiker? Think on it, Moira girl. Is it right I should be the one to suffer because you’ve a poor head for handling your finances?”

“Heaven forefend, Blackjack. Not even I could be that unreasonable,” Moira said, smiling a little in spite of herself. Once again, her wretched father had talked his way around her. The man had such a gift of gab he could persuade the Angel Gabriel into taking up residence in Hades.

“All right, you may stay,” she agreed through gritted teeth. “For a few days. But you will have to remain in the east wing until the earl leaves for Langley Hall.”

“And take me meals on a tray all alone in me room I suppose,” Blackjack said petulantly. “As if I would infect the rest of you with the plague should I sit down at the table with you.”

“Those are my terms. Take them or leave them,” Moira said, steeling herself against his hangdog look.

“You’ve grown hard, Moira girl. Something I never thought to see your mother’s daughter do.” Blackjack brushed a crocodile tear from his eye. “Will you let young Charlie visit me, at least to help while away the long, lonely hours?”

“Charles may visit you,” Moira agreed, struggling to maintain her stern demeanor, “but only if you promise you’ll not teach him any more of your colorful Irish expressions. Poor Elizabeth is still blushing from the ones he learned on your last visit.”

Moira was not the only member of the household to be aware of the arrival of the newcomers. In the fourth-floor nursery suite to which Charles had been restricted until his bodyguards arrived, he craned his neck out the window and exclaimed to Alfie that things were certain to liven up now that Grandpapa Blackjack had arrived.

“There’s nobody in the whole world knows more stories about exciting fellows like pirates and smugglers and such,” he added happily—a comment noted with a quailing heart by Elizabeth Kincaid, who was acting as the boys’ teacher until a suitable tutor could be found.

The clatter of horses’ hooves and the babble of voices carried, as well, through the open window of Devon’s second-floor bedchamber, where Stamden and he were enjoying a quiet conversation. At least Stamden was; Devon was still chafing from the murderous look the duchess had delivered him before stalking off in a huff half an hour earlier. And all because he had made a perfectly logical suggestion concerning the raising of the young duke.

“What is that racket in the courtyard?” he demanded of Ned Bridges, who stood staring out the window, a dumbfounded look on his square-jowled face. “It sounds like a regiment of the First Hussars has arrived in full battle regalia.”

“It’s four men. Four men I never thought to see again this side of the grave,” Ned replied in an awestruck voice. “Blackjack Reardon and the three Keough brothers to be exact. Now what would four of Cornwall’s slipperiest ‘gentleman’ be doing calling on the duchess and in broad daylight too? Answer me that if you can, Captain.”

“The ‘gentlemen’ is the local Cornishman’s term for smugglers,” Devon explained to Stamden. “Though it’s not commonly known, Ned plied the trade himself for a short while before joining the army.”

Stamden grinned. “I always had a feeling there was more to you than met the eye, Ned. Now I’m certain of it.” His eyes widened. “But wait just a minute. What was that you call the one fellow? ‘Blackjack Reardon’?”

He turned to Devon. “Does my memory serve me right? Didn’t you once mention that the duchess’s maiden name was Moira Reardon?”

“I did that,” Devon said grimly. “It would appear the annoying woman is blessed with at least one rather colorful relative. Which makes one wonder what other fruit her family tree might yield if given a proper shake.”

“Her grace’s name was Reardon? Are you sure of that, Captain?” Ned asked in a shaky voice.

“I’m sure.”