Vixen (6 page)

She wanted to say yes, but those little spurts of flame were too intimidating and the short word wouldn’t get past her lips.

“It would be inadvisable to challenge me, you should understand,” he continued in the same soft voice that had caused many a midshipman to shiver in his shoes.

Chloe recognized the side of her guardian that she had encountered that morning in the bedroom. It was a side with which she had no particular wish to become reacquainted.

There was total silence in the kitchen. Samuel scraped chopped mushrooms into a pan as if oblivious of the tension. Lawyer Scranton stared up at the smoke-blackened timber of the ceiling.

“You
don’t understand,” Chloe said finally in a much more moderate tone. “I couldn’t bear it anymore.” Then she turned her head away abruptly, biting her lip, desperately blinking away the tears crowding her eyes.

Hugo wondered if she realized how much more persuasive he found appeals to his sympathy than challenges to his authority. If she didn’t understand it now, she soon would, if she spent much time under his roof. He remembered her desolate question earlier: Why does no one want me? The urge to scoop her up and cuddle her was as ridiculous as it was inappropriate, but he felt it nevertheless.

“What would
you
like to do?” he asked with a briskness that disguised his sudden compassion. “Where would you like to go?”

“To London.” Chloe looked up, the tears miraculously dried. “I want to be presented at court and have my come-out. And then once I’m married and have my fortune,
I want to establish an animal hospital. It shouldn’t be too difficult to find a suitable husband,” she added reflectively, “one who won’t interfere too much. Eighty thousand pounds should count for something, and I’m quite pretty, I think.”

Elizabeth’s daughter had a talent for understatement, Hugo thought. “It shouldn’t prove too difficult to find a husband,” he agreed. “But whether you can find one willing to support your philanthropy, lass, I don’t know. Husbands can be an unaccommodating breed, or so I’ve been told.”

Chloe frowned. “Of course, Mama said Jasper intended me to marry Crispin. And that I certainly shouldn’t care to do.”

So that was it! Hugo drained his glass and reached again for the bottle. Simplicity itself. Jasper’s stepson from his wife’s former marriage would thus control Chloe’s fortune. There was no bar to such a union—not a drop of consanguinity. Presumably, Elizabeth had intended him to forestall such a plan. “Why don’t you care to?”

Her response was sharp and definite. “Crispin’s a brute … just like Jasper. He rode his hunter into the ground once and brought him home foundered and bleeding from his spurs. Oh, and he used to pull the wings off butterflies. I’m sure he hasn’t changed.”

No, not a suitable mate for someone with a mission to succor needy members of the animal kingdom. “Why has that foul-mouthed parrot only got one leg?” he asked involuntarily.

“I don’t know. I found him in Bolton. He’d been left in the gutter and it was raining.”

“Beefs ready.” Samuel made the laconic declaration as he turned the spit. “Lawyer stayin’?”

Scranton looked anxiously to his host and received a calm “If you care to.”

“Well, I daresay it’ll be way past dinner when I get home,” he said, rubbing his hands at the succulent aromas arising from the fireplace. “So I’ll thank ye kindly.”

“I’m starving,” Chloe declared.

“Had enough bread and cheese for nuncheon to feed a regiment,” Samuel commented, bringing the meat to the table.

“But that was hours ago. Shall I fetch knives and forks?” “In the dresser.”

That hideous dress did nothing to mask the grace of her movements, Hugo thought, watching her dance around his kitchen with an assumption of familiarity that filled him with foreboding. He went down to the cellar to bring up wine.

Chloe pushed her glass forward expectantly when he drew the cork.

“I’ve no objection to your drinking burgundy, but this is a particularly fine wine, so don’t gulp it like orgeat,” he cautioned, filling her glass.

Lawyer Scranton sipped and purred. Eating in the kitchen of a decaying manor house in the company of a man and his servant might be unusual, but there was no fault to be found with the fare.

Chloe seemed to agree. She consumed a quantity of rare beef, mushrooms, and potatoes that astounded Hugo, who wondered where in that tiny frame it could all be stored. Elizabeth, as he recalled, had had the appetite of a sparrow. He shook his head in a bemused gesture that was becoming all too familiar and returned to the issue of first importance.

“Scranton, you know both sides of Miss Gresham’s family. Are there any female relatives she could go to?”

“Oh, you can’t send me to stay with some elderly aunt who’ll expect me to walk an overfed pug and polish the silver,” Chloe said.

“I thought you liked animals,”

“I do, but I prefer the ones that other people don’t like.”

Revealing, he thought, but said only, “Do you have such an aunt?”

“Not that I know of,” Chloe said. “But there was a girl at the seminary who had one.”

Someone else’s aunt was not helpful. “Scranton?” Hugo appealed to the lawyer, who wiped his mouth with some deliberation and took another sip of his wine.

“Lady Gresham had no living relatives, Sir Hugo. Hence the size of Miss Gresham’s fortune. I don’t know about Sir Stephen’s side of the family. But perhaps Sir Jasper would be of assistance there.”

That was a dead end if he was to honor Elizabeth’s unspoken wishes. “I suppose I could employ a governess—no don’t interrupt again,” he said sharply as Chloe’s now-familiar expostulation began. “The lass could be established somewhere in the charge of a respectable female.”

“And do what?” Chloe demanded.

It was not an unreasonable question, he was obliged to admit. However …

“I don’t see any other solution. Your education isn’t yet complete—”

“It’s perfectly complete,” she interrupted, forgetting the earlier stricture. “I can do everything any schoolroom miss can do, and a great deal else besides.”

“Like what?”

“I can mend a bird’s broken wing, and deliver a lamb. I know how to treat a sprained fetlock and foot rot—”

“I don’t doubt it,” he interrupted in his turn. “But it doesn’t alter the facts.”

“Why can’t I stay here?” She asked the simple question almost without emphasis.

“And do what?” Hugo gave her her own again. “Lancashire is a long way from a come-out in London.”

“Maybe not,” she said quietly.

Now, what the hell did that mean? Hugo gave up. There was clearly nothing to be done tonight. “It seems there’s little choice for the moment. You’ll have to stay here tonight.”

“I told you so,” Chloe said to Samuel with a sweet smile, gathering up the dirty plates.

“Reckon you did,” Samuel said.

T
HE DOG’S DESOLATE
howling was a perfect background to crowding memories. Hugo sat at the pianoforte in the library, a single tallow candle throwing a pool of yellow light over the keyboard as his hands strived to pick out a melody from the past. It was a piece he’d composed for Elizabeth, but part of the refrain was missing from his memory.

Impatiently, he swung away from the instrument, picking up his glass. He didn’t think he’d ever played it for her anyway. He drained the contents of the glass and refilled it.

His love for Stephen’s wife had been a secret he’d kept from everyone but Elizabeth … a secret that the infatuated stripling both nurtured and fed upon during the two years he’d known her. They had never consummated their love. It would have been unthinkable for Elizabeth to have done so, and, despite the gnawing need he had suffered, he had enjoyed the purity of his feelings for her. It was such a contrast to the sewage in which he’d been wallowing.

He remembered the first time he’d met her as if it were yesterday. She had said almost nothing the entire weekend, but he’d been haunted by her beauty, by the shadows in her blue eyes, by the sense of her fragility—and the longing to be of service to her, to rescue her from whatever was causing her such unhappiness, had become an obsession.

It was just after his induction into the Congregation of Eden, as they called themselves, and a meeting was being
held at Gresham Hall in Shipton. The society had been founded by Stephen and two of his cronies, and through his son, Jasper, its membership had quickly spread to the younger segment of London’s aristocracy, bored with the endless round of pointless pleasures, seeking experiences that would take them beyond the boundaries of the commonplace world.

Hugo had just lost his father when he fell under the spell of the Greshams. Only seven miles separated Denholm and Shipton, and he’d known them slightly all his life. A motherless only child, lonely and directionless, he had eagerly accepted Jasper’s overtures after his father’s death, and came to see him almost as an older brother, and Stephen … not as a father, certainly, but the attention of such a worldly sophisticate, such a prominent member of Society, had flattered his youth and inexperience and compensated in some fashion for the loss of his father.

Under Stephen Gresham’s leadership, nothing was forbidden the members of the Congregation; there were no risks that couldn’t be taken; there were substances that altered the mind … that could as easily create a wondrous world as one so terrifying, it drove a man crazy; there was gaming for stakes that rapidly exhausted a moderate fortune; and there were the women.

He had assumed the women who participated in the orgies in the crypt were willing. Some of them were Society women whom he’d believed to be as eager for the sensual thrills as any of the men. He knew now that not all of them fell into that category; Stephen was not averse to blackmail. The other women were whores, paid more for their participation in one evening than they would make in a month on the streets. Drink and the strange herbal substances that were always in ample supply soon banished any inhibitions.

Until the night Stephen had brought Elizabeth to the crypt …

T
he tall clock in the library struck two. The dog’s howling filled the night. Hugo swore and drank deeply from his recharged glass. For some reason, the brandy wasn’t taking effect. He was as far from oblivion as ever, and his thoughts were as raw. But perhaps it wasn’t surprising, with Elizabeth’s daughter asleep under his roof. And that damned mournful mongrel didn’t help either.

He went back to the pianoforte, trying to drown out the desolate sound by concentrating on his music. Abruptly, he stopped, listening, wondering what he’d heard. Some tiny sound from the hall. He shrugged. He hadn’t heard anything. How could he have over that racket?

And then miraculously the howling ceased. The silence filled his head and he could hear the sounds of the slumbering house, the creaks and shifts of the oak floors, the slight rattle of the casement in the night breeze.

He went into the hall. The door to the courtyard was unlatched. He could think of only one explanation. Presumably, Chloe was intending to smuggle the dog upstairs.

He opened the door. The sky was cloudless and the summer night was bright with stars shining down onto the deserted courtyard. He decided to wait in the hall for her. If he gave her a fright, she had only herself to blame. However, after fifteen minutes there was no sign of either his ward or the dog. And there was no sound from the stables either.

Curious now, he lit a lantern and went out into the courtyard, crossing to the stables where the miserable Dante had been confined. His footsteps were muffled
by the littering straw and he lifted the latch on the stable door with exaggerated care. At first he could see nothing and held the lantern high. A puddle of golden light fell on a corner of an open stall. A small, white-clad figure was curled against the dog in the straw, her arm around his neck, her head resting on his flank.

“Hell and the devil,” Hugo muttered with a surge of irritation. She was sleeping like the dead. Dante cocked a benign eye at the intruder and his tail thumped in greeting. Obviously, he didn’t know at whose orders he was being made miserable.

Hugo set down the lantern and bent over Chloe. “Wake up,” he said, shaking her shoulder. “What the devil do you think you’re doing?”

Chloe woke, blinking and bemused. “What … where … oh, I remember.” She sat up. “Since you won’t let Dante into the house, I had to come to him. I couldn’t let him go on howling like that.”

“I have never heard such nonsense,” he said. “Go up to bed at once.”

“Not without Dante,” she said flatly. “I haven’t slept a wink, it’s impossible with him howling. I can’t imagine anyone sleeping through it. And now I’m so tired, I’d as soon sleep here as anywhere.”

“You are not sleeping in a stable,” he stated, standing over her, rocking lightly on the balls of his feet, his hands on his hips.

Chloe regarded him steadily, assessing the strength of his determination, testing it against her own. He’d warned her against challenging him, but this time she had a master card up her sleeve. “Good night,” she said with a sweet smile, and lay down again.