The Lady Mercy Danforthe Flirts With Scandal (23 page)

She currently wore it in a long braid that hung over her shoulder and reached almost to her waist. As he spoke, his gaze dripped down the length of that braid and all the way back up again. Slowly.

“If you give me one kiss, milkmaidy, I’ll be a good boy and go.”

Mercy studied his countenance and saw that he tried very hard to keep it straight. “I don’t believe you.”

“Kiss me, maidy.” He sat up and grabbed the end of her braid. “Come down here and kiss me.”

So now it wasn’t just a kiss. She had to get down on the bed with him to give it. There was always something, she thought. Give a man an inch, and he’d take a mile.

“Otherwise, I’ll stay here all night,” he added with another of those wolfish grins.

Mercy shook her head, tugged her braid free of his hand, and took her candle to the door. “I’ll go and find Grieves.”

He was up off the bed and striding toward her in the next breath. She tripped, fell with her back to the door, and Rafe Hartley kissed her. He kissed her like a man who’d been waiting all night, all day. All his life.

And Mercy gripped that candle as if it was a plank of wood and she was shipwrecked in the midst of the Atlantic. One free hand was not enough to push him away. She let that be her excuse.

“I’m not ready to throw down my cards,” he whispered against her lips. “This game is not yet lost.”

“I am engaged to another,” she reminded him, terse, but annoyed with herself as much as with him.

“You were mine first.”

Mercy groaned in true despair. “Go home. Please.” She needed him gone before temptation overwhelmed her again.

“But I’ve not had my dessert yet.” Slowly he kissed down her neck to her bosom.

“You said one kiss,” she protested, not very convincingly, her back still pressed to the door.

“Just one more,” he whispered, his breath hot and wet through her lace.

“Very well then. One.”

He slid farther down her body, and then she felt his hands lifting her nightgown. “I mustn’t waste it.” He cursed softly at all the lace ruffles impeding his progress, and then, for a moment, he made her wait. Her breath almost snuffed the candle flame that wavered fitfully before her.

“Your viscount should know,” Rafe muttered, on his knees, fists bunching her nightgown up above her hips, “that this common man doesn’t defer to titles. This man doesn’t hand over his property without a fight.” His lips ventured between her thighs where he kissed her directly on the sensitive spot that throbbed and ached, causing her so much anguish. “And I don’t treat poachers leniently when they trespass, so he’d best beware.”

She was too shocked to speak, and if she could form words, what would she say?

Stop
seemed most unlikely.

Please
continue
seemed dangerously possible.

His wet tongue darted out, and the curled tip swept teasingly over her furrow. Once. Twice. It left her quivering, hot, yearning.

He blew on her roused flesh. Gently. Wickedly. Deliberately increasing the waves of need flowing through her, making her hips move a fraction toward him in silent plea. But he let the ruffled hem of her nightgown fall back into place, where the lace stroked her from thigh to ankle. Then he stood. “My stepmother was right. You do have a cure for what ails me. And I have the cure for what ails you. One day you might realize that. Come to me when you do.”

“You have nothing I need,” she replied tightly.

“Give me one night to prove you wrong.”

“Never.” Accustomed to getting whatever he wanted with one blue-eyed wink, now he meant to treat her like a naive dairymaid or some giggling light-skirt. She was Lady Mercy Danforthe, not Fanny Hill.

“Does your viscount know about me?”

“Why would he?” she demanded, imperious.

He cupped her chin in his palm and kept her face turned up to him. “If my future wife had another entanglement, I’d want to know.”

“You and I are not entangled. We never were.”

“On the contrary.” His gaze was on her lips again, heated and lusty. “We will never be free of each other. I, at least, have the good sense to realize it.”

“Again, let me remind you, it was not a marriage. It was void by law.”

“I was too poor and common for your brother.”

“There were many reasons why that marriage could not be.”

“Tell me what they are again, then. I need a reminder.”

“Why waste my breath? You may be rash and reckless, but you are no simpleton. If you did not know what the rules were, you would not be able to bite your thumb at them as you do.”

“Jabber, jabber, jabber. Plain terms, woman, if you please.”

“Very well, then.” She paused, looked up into his eyes, and then said, “Our worlds are legions apart.”

For practical and logical reasons—not to mention their own sanity and health—they were better off apart. Better off with partners from within their own spheres. By an accident of fate they’d been thrown together in the past, chance and mutual acquaintance making an introduction when they should probably never have met. Certainly should never have shared a kiss.

Mercy was suddenly conscious of gazing too long into his hungry blue eyes. For such a cool color, they were remarkably hot tonight. She quickly closed her eyelids tightly, saving herself from the heat, but when she sank into that darkness, her mind showed pictures she would rather not have—of a huge, overgrown bramble hedge looming, and the horse under her galloping for it while she clung on. She felt her seat lifting, control ripped from her by the powerful horse. So she opened her eyes again and looked at Rafe.

“I wish you were coming home with me,” he said, his voice low. “I am envious of the time you spend in anyone else’s company. Even when we argue, I would rather you quarrel with me than any other.”

She did not know what to say. This was another difference between them. Rafe never feared to show his feelings. He opened himself up to be hurt, left his heart vulnerable. Her Danforthe courage balked at that. It was the only time it failed her.

“I’d like to see you every day,” he added. “To wake and see you there beside me. Or, if I could not have that, to know at least that I would see you at some time in the day.”

It was as if he left his words on ribbons of silk that wrapped around her heart. She could not get free of them.

“My lust for you has not decreased, Bossy-Drawers. What are you going to do about it?”

There, he did it again. Saying things he should not, blasting the rules.

“What is your answer for that?” he demanded. “How will you solve my problem?”

Our problem, she thought.
Remain
calm
, she warned herself. Nothing must show on her face. “As Lady Ursula says, a relationship begun out of lust is a mistake.”

“Do you suppose she knows anything about lust?” Amusement trickled from his voice like gentle summer rain through leafy branches. “I believe you and I know more about that.”

“Rafe Hartley, you shall not be young and handsome forever, and then ladies will no longer be so ready to forgive you for speaking improperly. I hope you realize how much you get away with already.”

“Ladies who don’t like plain speaking would never be in my company.”

“Since you asked me to find you a bride, it is my duty to guide you in these matters. Do make some attempt to conform.”

He stared, incredulous. “You still think to find me another bride?”

“Of course. Why not?” Even as she spoke, Mercy felt another surge of nausea, and now she knew what caused it. Nothing to do with the soup at dinner.

She couldn’t bear to think of him with another woman. She was shocked by the intensity of her inner protest. Her body railed against the injustice, while her mind tried to regain order.

As long as she knew things were in their place, there could be no accidents. No tragedies.

But Rafe was a man out of place, and he refused to stay in the box where she put him.

“For you I am like lavender. You like the scent of me—can’t keep away from me—but I make you sneeze.” He was almost laughing at her, but there was still fire in his eyes. “You can’t understand why you have those desires for a common fellow like me. You’ve chosen to pretend they don’t exist. Your heart”—he placed his hand over her left breast—“is not accustomed to doing anything but pumping your blood around. Apparently it takes objection to any other task.”

Her nipple, already alert and primed, swelled further under his heavy hand. He cupped her breast. His thumb brushed over the sharpened peak, teasing it lightly.

Finally she pushed his hand away and stepped aside. “Get out,” she hissed, her breath forced out in a desperate rush. How dare he touch her that way and put his mouth on her, reduce her to a trembling jelly?

“Have it your way then,” he snapped, all humor gone from his tone. “Find me that bride as soon as possible and send me a bill for your fee, won’t you?”

“Certainly.” To her horror, tears threatened. She blamed it on her heightened emotions, the shock of finding him on her bed and then the recent, vivid return of painful memories.

The dreadful hollow ache in her heart.

And with all these sensations carved into the memory, there was the cool, smooth surface of the ball she held in her chubby hands just before she dropped it into the box of toys and closed the lid.

With no more to say, Rafe opened the door and passed through it into the dimly lit hall. No one, fortunately, was about.

Mercy closed her door and sank against it, eyes shut tight, breath scratching at her throat. She thought again of her mother, this time wearing a riding habit, being carried into the house on a stretcher. She heard her father’s anger:
“She should never have taken the hedge. I told her to go by the gate, but she was laughing, determined. Reckless woman.”
She saw her mother’s pale face, her eyes closed, brambles caught in her hair, mud streaked across her skirt, a limp, gloved hand falling over the side of the makeshift stretcher.

Another accident. The last her mother had. Not Mercy’s fault that time.

Or was it? Certainly, it could be argued that if not for the miscarriage caused by Mercy leaving her ball out on the landing, her mother would not have been out riding six months later. She would have been preparing to welcome a new baby into the world instead of joining the hunt that day, taking hedges at full gallop just to feel the thrill.

Mercy’s recall of these tragic events had been nudged violently by Lilibet Hartley’s prank the previous day. Every moment came back to her again now, flooded in. Her mother’s cry as she slipped on the wooden ball and tumbled. The halting, painful pattern of her own fearful, guilty pulse when she realized her carelessness had somehow caused her mother to lose a child—a little sister, according to the gossiping housemaids.

Then the riding accident and her mother’s death, which had just assuredly been the end of her father’s life too, although he lingered on for five more years. She was now forced to relive moments in her youth, when being left in the care of a wayward brother made her feel exposed, vulnerable again. Carver was not quite twenty-one when he inherited his title on the sudden death of their father. He was still bent on his own pleasures, not ready for responsibility. In the gasp of their father’s last breath, all changed. From then on, they had only each other, and Mercy felt as if she was rattling around in a runaway coach with no driver at the reins. It was an unsettled period that further reaffirmed what Mercy first learned on the night of her mother’s miscarriage; that the world is only as certain as one can make it. The best a person could do was try and be prepared for any eventuality. To have a path laid out and keep to it.

Since then, the only giddy moments she’d known had happened in Rafe’s company. When she was seventeen, and then, more recently. The rest of the time she kept to her path and tried to keep other folk to theirs. She was so busy concentrating on straight lines that her childhood had passed quickly after her parents’ deaths.

Rafe, on the other hand, preferred curves and circles. He was free to wander about, blithely chasing pleasure without a thought for duty. He was unorganized and unpredictable. A wandering stray. Dangerous.

Sadly irresistible.

Do
pull
your
garters
up, woman.
And put your toys away.

While she sat with a napping Lady Ursula the day after the dinner party, Mercy attempted to write a list of potential brides for Rafe. As much as her mind wandered from the task, he had thrown the gauntlet down last night before he left her chamber, and Mercy never refused a challenge. Perhaps he’d said it only to taunt her because he was angry at her rejection. What did his reasons matter? Men seldom knew their own minds when it came to relationships, but the sooner she found him a bride, the better for everyone. He would realize it too, eventually.

Time to immerse herself in business before any sneaky desire for pleasure reared its wicked head again.

The memories of her mama had surely come to warn her. Take the gate, not the hedge. This was no time to be careless, or someone could be hurt. Already he’d tempted her to flirt with scandal, and it simply could not happen again. He
said
he wanted a bride. She would find him one and, in so doing, prove to herself that she could give him up with equanimity.

Mercy had some familiarity with the local flock of young ladies and knew a few by name, others only by sight. Since Mrs. Hartley was out, she could not appeal to her for help, but when Lady Ursula woke after a particularly loud snore and sat upright, demanding to know what list she was writing, Mercy decided to seek the old lady’s assistance.

With her ninety years of amassed knowledge, and a memory that could be surprisingly thorough when it chose to be, Lady Ursula turned out to be a fount of information on the eligible women of Morecroft. Curiously, she could not remember who Rafe was or how he was connected to her, but she knew the lineage of every bonneted maiden they saw from the parlor windows, and the secrets of every married lady too.