The Harem Bride (2 page)

“
Aye, Miss, thank y’ kindly,” the man
replied before disappearing into the night.

Thank goodness he had not seemed displeased
by the amount of his vail. Miss Penelope Blayne had not traveled
the world without learning the value and worth of those who
served.

Although the entry hall was actually quite
chilly, it enveloped both women in a blanket of seeming warmth.
“Ah-h,” Penny murmured, swaying slightly on her feet, much too
tired to examine the details of her surroundings..

“
You the one what was expected?” the
butler drawled, now propping himself up with one hand against the
wall.

Penny drew herself up to her full five feet
three inches, somehow managing to look down her nose at the butler
who towered over her even while drooping against the wall. She was
aware of raucous noises tumbling down from the open gallery on the
floor above. Shrieks of female laughter or purported fright rose
over guffaws and excited shouts in a cacophony of male baritone and
bass. An orgy? Here? Now? How could he! When he knew she was
expected. Or was that perhaps why . . .? Oh, yes, most likely that
was the explanation. This unique welcome had been staged for her
delectation.

Monster!

“
Mrs. Wilton don’t like to be roused
out o’ her bed,” the drunken butler muttered, more to himself than
to the two shivering ladies.

“
What is your name?” Penny
snapped.

For a moment the poor man looked as if he
didn’t know. “Hutton, Miss,” he said finally, responding to her
imperious tone by making a futile effort to straighten away from
the wall.

“
Hutton, you will send for the
housekeeper immediately. I do not care if she arrives here in her
nightgown or her chemise. I want her here within five minutes, do
you understand?”

The two guests watched, fascinated, as the
butler shoved off from the front wall and lurched across the hall,
careening more madly than the post chaise as it had climbed the
hill to Rockbourne Crest. When his hands finally found the
bellpull, Penny feared he was clinging so tightly, he would pull it
from the wall. But after jerking it several times, Hutton merely
subsided, sinking slowly down the wall until he was sitting
upright, his feet flat out in front him, his head flopping limply
to one side.

“
Behold!” Penny groaned as the two
women sank into a pair of elaborately carved oak chairs, which
looked as if they might have been in the entry hall since Jacobean
times. More importantly, the chairs were about as far away from the
unconscious Hutton as they could get. “We are soaked through. Our
bonnets are in ruins, very like our boots as well. My hair must be
as plastered to my head as yours, frost still drips from my lashes,
and we are both shivering so hard we could be taken for having an
ague.”

“
Which we surely will if we must spend
the night in this entry,” Noreen declared roundly. “Do you think
the entire household is foxed?” she added on a more anxious
note.

“
If that is the case—” Penny declared
most awfully, her dire tone echoing through the sparsely furnished
hall.

“
I assure you, Miss, I do not imbibe!”
A formidable woman confronted them from the far side of the entry
hall, her face as stiff with outrage as the uncompromising lines of
her black bombazine gown.

“
I am glad to hear it, Mrs. Wilton,”
Penny declared, allowing her eyes to drift to the peacefully
oblivious form of Hutton, the butler, still seated haphazardly
against the wall.

“
That one!” sniffed the housekeeper.
“Stackpole, his lordship’s London butler was too fine to come to
the wilds of Shropshire, so we’re stuck with
him
.” She nodded at Hutton’s recumbent form. “As
heedless as the master and his guests, he is. The poor, foolish
soul, not realizing gents may do as they please, while he may find
himself out on his ear without a feather to fly with.”

Penny noted this sad prospect did not seem to
disturb Mrs. Wilton one whit.

“
Well, come, then,” the housekeeper
commanded, as if to recalcitrant children, “I presume you’re Miss
Blayne. There’s a room ready, though why his lordship should put
you there, I cannot conceive. With the house full of rakes and
whatall, you’ll be wanting to have your maid sleep in your dressing
room tonight, and make sure to lock your door.” After these rather
startling admonitions, Mrs. Wilton turned and headed toward the
imposing L-shaped oak staircase leading to the gallery above,
clearly expecting the guests to follow.

“
One moment, Mrs. Wilton,” Penny
called, rising to her feet. “I want to be sure the postboys are
properly accommodated, and I should like them to have a hot
toddy.”

Mrs. Wilton, pausing at the foot of the
stairs, turned to glare at Miss Penelope Blayne. “Hot toddies, is
it? For the postboys? And me with a houseful of rakehells and
ladybirds drinking everything in sight. In truth, ’tis a wonder
Hutton found a drop for himself.
Postboys!
Good Lord, Miss, are you a
radical?”

Penny planted her feet on the
diamond-patterned tiles, now well muddied by melting sleet and
dirty boots. “I assure you, Mrs. Wilton, if not for the efforts of
those two men, Miss O’Donnell and I might be freezing to death in a
ditch. You will find someone to make and deliver a cold collation
and hot toddies to the stables immediately.”

“
You heard the lady, Hetty, my love.” A
new voice boomed through the entry hall. “I suggest you see to it
immediately. The lady is merely upholding the hospitality of the
house, something I’m sure Rocksley would expect you to
do.”

Penny, turning swiftly, could only stare. No,
it could not be. Jason Lisbourne had not changed that much. His
hair had once been the gold of a new-minted guinea, and even if it
had darkened through the years, as hers had, he could not have
become a redhead. A tall, almost skinny redhead with skin nearly as
pale as Noreen’s Irish coloring and cheeks nearly as pink. And this
man was as cursed as Noreen with that redhead’s nemesis, freckles.
A second look showed that, although he was smiling, it was a
lopsided sardonic grin, the curled lips of a man of the world,
bored and disillusioned by the shallowness around him.

“
Gant Deveny,” he said, sweeping her a
bow that was close to mockery. “Lord Brawley. And there’s many will
tell you the name is apt.” Hands on hips, he threw back his
shoulders, assuming a belligerent stance. “I have that redhead
temper, you see. When I’m not too lazy to indulge it, that is,” he
added on a wink.

Clearly, this man was nearly as far
gone in his cups as poor Hutton.
Brawley.
Brawl
. “Oh, I see,” Penny said faintly, wishing only
to find her room and burrow under a mountain of
bedcovers.

“
Who can say if there’s a footman left
standing,” Mrs. Wilton grumbled, but she tugged on the
bellpull.

“
Surely not all the maids are tipsy as
well,” Penny snapped. The housekeeper shrugged. It was at last
becoming apparent that Mrs. Wilton was openly hostile, though the
why of it Penny could not imagine.

“
Ah, there you are, Rocksley! Lord
Brawley drawled. “Come to greet your guests at last, have
you?”

Penny felt a frisson of wind as icy as that
blowing beyond the great front door. Behind her. Jason was behind
her, and, oh, dear God, she couldn’t look up, she couldn’t
move!

“
Come, come, Rocksley,” Gant Deveny
chided, rather gleefully. “See to your guests.”

Unsteady, somewhat shuffling, steps
approached.
Oh, no, not Jason too!
A large body appeared in front of her. She who had been such
an intrepid soul all her life fixed her eyes on the tips of his
boots and kept them there. Long fingers reached out, tilted up her
chin. She kept her eyes down. A head, topped by waves of rumpled
brown hair, bent to peer beneath her bonnet. A pair of fine cobalt
blue eyes regarded her with interest, the effect considerably
spoiled by the red lines criss-crossing the whites. His nose was
sharper, she thought, and far more arrogant than when he was a
young man of twenty-one. But his mouth—ah, that was the same—full
and eminently kissable . . .

Horrified, Miss Penelope Blayne jerked her
chin out of her Trustee’s grasp and looked past him, to fix her
disapproving gaze on Hutton.

“
Looks like a drowned rat,” the Earl of
Rocksley intoned, “but I daresay that’s my Penelope.” He sighed. “A
bit long in the tooth. Looked considerably better the last time I
saw her, but what’s a man to do?” He shrugged. “Daresay she’ll do.
Don’t have much choice.”

Miss Penelope Blayne managed to keep her
countenance, but Noreen O’Donnell’s indignant gasp filled the
hall.

“
So who is she?” Lord Brawley asked,
lifting an inquiring brow. “Too far gone for proper introductions,
are you, Rock?”

“
Not at all, not at all,” said Jason
Lisbourne, Earl of Rocksley. “Gant, dear boy, I’d like you to meet
m’wife.”

~ * ~

Upon the following morning, Jason Victor
Granville Lisbourne, Earl of Rocksley, opened one bloodshot eye and
surveyed the burgundy velvet hangings at the foot of his bed with
considerable loathing. Not that the innocent fabric had offended.
Oh, no. It was merely a symbol of the world to which he did not
care to return. Of his disgust with himself, his wish that all his
party guests, including his closest friend Gant Deveny, had
miraculously disappeared, whisked off in a hail of sleet. That his
butler had been truly unconscious and that his housekeeper was
deaf, dumb, and blind.

Aa-rgh!
The
earl’s eye snapped shut, his lips thinned as his head and stomach
threatened simultaneous explosion. He grimaced, groaned, swallowed
hard, and managed to croak a faint, “Kirby!”

His meticulous and highly efficient valet,
Daniel Kirby, whisked back the bed hangings so fast the earl could
only assume he had been standing, patiently waiting, beside the
bed. After gulping down the concoction Kirby held to his lips, then
disgorging the acidic contents of his much-abused stomach into the
basin the faithful valet held to his lips, Jason Lisbourne fell
back on his pillows. Alas, he was now fit enough to loathe himself
still more.

Nearly ten years he had kept the secret. Ten
long years. And then, within moments of seeing Penelope Blayne, he
had blurted out their dire secret in front of witnesses. Gant was a
friend, of course. In spite of the viscount’s cynical outlook on
the world, the earl knew he could count on Brawley not to reveal
what he had heard. But Hutton, who may not have been as dead to the
proceedings in the hall as he appeared? And Mrs. Wilton, who had
been sour and straight-laced about his doings even before taking up
Methodism? Hell and damnation! By now the whole household, and each
and every guest, would know he had a wife!

Perhaps the sleet had turned to snow?
Mayhap there was a mountain of it outside, trapping the secret
within his own walls. Which presently contained at least half the
most accomplished tale bearers in the
ton
. Including Mrs. Daphne Coleraine.

Daphne!
The
Earl of Rocksley moaned, willing the fiendish pixies banging anvils
within his head to cease and desist. “The roads, Kirby, are they
passable?”

“
Indeed, my lord, I believe they are.
The sleet turned to snow, but deposited only an inch or two. The
roads this morning are nothing worse than their customary winter
state.” A slight sniff indicated what Rocksley’s fastidious valet
thought of country roads. “Any proper coachman should be able to
manage, my lord.”

To the devil with it then. His guests could
go. They could all go, spreading the news to every flapping ear
along a beeline back to London, for he could scarcely have his
present houseful of guests of dubious reputation in residence with
Miss Penelope Blayne.

Penelope Blayne Lisbourne, Countess of
Rocksley.

“
The basin, Kirby,” the earl gasped.
“At once!”

“
My dear fellow,” drawled Gant Deveny a
few agonizing minutes later as he strolled into the earl’s
bedchamber, “I am sorry to see you in such a state. Truly, I had
thought you the man of rock-hard head and cast iron
stomach.”

“
Go away.”

“
But I have come to see how you go on,
dear chap. The house is so ominously quiet I feared everyone had
expired. There’s not even a sign of the lovely Lady
Rocksley.”

“
Lovely!” Jason Lisbourne
sputtered.

“
Quite so, I believe, when not dripping
icicles onto the tiles. Indeed, I rather thought I caught a glimpse
of an elegant figure beneath—”

“
Be quiet!” roared the earl. Then,
after a groan of misery brought on by his burst of temper, he
ground out, “Miss Blayne is none of your concern.”

“
Not the happy reunion of Ulysses and
his faithful Penelope, I take it,” Lord Brawley drawled.

“
If I could move, I’d darken your
daylights.”

“
Ah-h,” Gant murmured, and wisely kept
silent.

“
Kirby,” the earl called to his valet,
“is Hutton up and about?”

“
I fear Hutton, my lord, is in worse
case than your lordship.”