Worth Lord of Reckoning (11 page)

“They are no different from you or me, Cook,” Jacaranda warned her. “They eat when they’re hungry, they sleep when they’re tired, or they should.”

Though they tended to drink a fair bit, in Jacaranda’s experience, and sometimes to impose on the chambermaids.

“If you say so, Mrs. W, but I don’t suppose you’d be willing to look over the menus in advance?”

“I suppose I would, because we don’t know when this relation of the Ketterings’ is descending. You’ll want to stock up now, and I will approve the expenses.”

She made her regular inspection then, finding the new chambermaid had neglected to open the drapes in the downstairs parlor, and the downstairs footmen were taking rather too long to clean the glass lamps in the corridor sconces. She informed them exactly when the new girl would take her break—the young lady seemed canny enough—and tracked Simmons down to his favorite place to nap, the butler’s pantry.

He went into transports to think the master of the household was having company, and
titled
company, and when Jacaranda left him, he was for the first time in her memory counting the silver she’d counted once a month for five years.

Her stomach was rumbling as she climbed to the third floor to check on Yolanda’s new room. She found Avery with her aunt, both girls holding hands in the middle of the room.

“You start slowly, so you can learn to move the same time I do,” Avery was saying. “Now, with me. Step, behind, step,
kick
. Again, step, behind, step,
kick.
”

Yolanda dropped her niece’s hand. “Hello, Mrs. Wyeth. Avery is teaching me a dance.”

“Not one you’ll need in any ballroom, I take it?”

Avery grinned and executed a lovely pirouette in arabesque. “Not for the ballrooms. Uncle’s opera dancers teach me their dances while we wait for him in the kitchen.”

“His—!” Jacaranda shut her mouth with a snap. “Yolanda, is your room more to your liking?”

“Very much.” Yolanda smiled back at her, as if Uncle entertaining opera dancers—
plural
—wasn’t a scandalous situation for a small child to know of—for any child to know of. “I can see the drive and the stables and side terrace. Trysting is really a lovely house. I’m surprised Worth doesn’t spend more time here.”

Jacaranda’s surprise was easily contained. The wilds of Surrey suffered a paucity of opera dancers, after all.

Opera dancers. Plural. In the kitchen. Teaching Avery scandalous dances.

Angels abide.

“Luncheon should be ready, so you’ll want to freshen up.” Jacaranda left them, step, behind, step,
kicking
amid a flurry of giggles, and knew the need to strangle her employer.

Men had urges over which they exercised not one bit more control than they had to. Jacaranda knew this.

“No better than they should be, the sorry lot of them,” she muttered as she careened around a corner and ran into the principal author of her distress.

“You!”

“Me?”

“Mr. Kettering, you will excuse me.” She leveled her most righteous glare at him and tacked left to circumnavigate him, but he stepped back and cut her off with his sheer, bodily presence.

“No, Mrs. Wyeth, I will not excuse you when you’re clearly in a temper.” His fingers manacled her wrist, and just that touch, warm, strong, and altogether male, made her temper snap its leash.

“I detest no man more than he who takes advantage of female innocence. You destroy something that can never be replaced, never repaired. Innocence doesn’t become merely wrinkled or tarnished, it’s gone forever. You leave in its place betrayal and a sorry knowledge no lady should have to bear.”

“
What
are you going on about?”

“Step, behind, step,
kick
.” She wrenched her wrist from his and would have flounced off, except he snatched her wrist again and pulled her into an empty bedroom, kicking the door closed behind them.

“Explain yourself, Wyeth. You aren’t a woman who flies into a taking easily, so I’m doing you the courtesy of hearing you out.”

He stood between her and the door, fists on his hips, and in the ensuing silence, Jacaranda realized anew that her employer was one of few people on the face of the earth who might have no trouble physically subduing her.

He was large enough, strong enough, and sufficiently unconstrained by manners when it suited him.

“Your light-skirts are teaching Avery indecent dances in your kitchen.”

He locked the door, then stalked over to peer down at her. “Is it the location of the dancing, the nature of it, or the nature of the instructors you object to?”

“She’s a little girl! Her mother would have wanted you to protect her from such influences, not parade them and their unfortunate morals before the child.”

“You think so?”

“I know so,” Jacaranda shot back. “Those women cannot help their circumstances, I know that, too, but if you intend to prey on them, can’t you at least do it where Avery has no knowledge of it? Gentlemen are expected to exercise discretion even when they can’t exercise control.”

“You have a very bad opinion of men, don’t you?” His tone was curious, and he was standing entirely too close. “For example, if I kissed you right now, you’d wallop me at the least and probably ban me from my own house. I adore a ferocious woman.”

“You seek to turn the subject, and crudely. Avery should not be exposed to your debaucheries.”
If I kissed you?
Despite Jacaranda’s considerable anger at the man before her, her gaze dropped to his mouth. Damn him to Hades, it was a beautiful mouth, even when it wasn’t turned up in that faint smile.

“Come sit with me, and I will explain to you what transpires in my London household. As a courtesy, mind you, because you’re concerned for the child, not because you’re entitled to explanations. One must always be mindful of setting unfortunate precedents.”

When she didn’t move, he took her hand and led her to a window bench. The cushion could accommodate them both—barely.

“Avery likes the opera dancers, you see.” He kept her hand in his and drew his fingers over her palm. He had an ink stain on his right cuff—ink was the very devil to get out—and his touch was mesmerizing, soothing and arousing at once.

Arousing?

“Avery likes the dancers, or you do?”

“We both do. Moira went to Paris to study art during the Peace of Amiens, and then remained, against my judgment and Hess’s. Nobody wanted her there, but I suspect she was enamored of Avery’s father and unwilling to come home. Then she was
unable
to come home, and I didn’t become aware of Avery’s existence until the False Peace.”

“I know the French are not as judgmental regarding their diversions, but the child is in England.”

“She is.” He laced his fingers with hers, and Jacaranda bore it, because her employer was a man who liked to touch. He touched his niece and his sister, he patted Wickie on the shoulder, and he put his arm around his housekeeper in the moonlight.

He also entertained opera dancers in his very home. She tried to withdraw her hand.

“You will hear me out, Wyeth, because I will not repeat this tale. Moira’s artistic aspirations came to naught, and when Avery’s father died, Moira eventually supported herself at the
opera comique
, if what Avery tells me is accurate. The dancers remind Avery of happy times with her mother. I gather the child became some sort of backstage mascot. I have an opera dancer to thank for the fact Avery arrived safely to these shores.”

“You justify your choice of paramour on this basis? Your lapse of discretion?”

“Do you imagine opera dancers don’t age, Mrs. Wyeth? Do you imagine they don’t fall sick or suffer injury? You can turn your ankle and put it up with ice and arnica for a fortnight if you need to, but if they twist their ankles, they don’t eat.”

“For God’s sake, you don’t expect me to believe you paw these women out of charitable impulses?”

“I do not paw women, not any women, ever. If you must know, I handle investments for my opera dancers, you fire-breathing little besom.”

And then he kissed her.

He settled his lips on hers, gently, so gently, while his hand came up to caress her jaw, then her hair, then to rest softly on her throat, so his thumb could brush over her cheek. His touch was sunbeam-light, warm as a breeze, and left wicked, wicked pleasure drizzling over her skin and into her mind. His mouth treasured hers, parting so his tongue could tease and taste and coax at her lips. When he eased away, Jacaranda’s own mouth was parted, and her wits—and her indignation—had deserted her utterly.

“The opera dancers won’t come to my office in Mayfair,” he said, dropping his hand. “We meet in my kitchen, instead, where I can insist they eat some decent food, and my footmen can see them safely home. I do not
paw
them, though they’re a great deal more honest about their willingness to be pawed—and do some pawing of their own—than their so-called betters. I’ll see you after luncheon.”

He rose and left. Jacaranda stared after him, unseeing, her hand cradling her jaw while she stifled an unaccountable urge to cry.

* * *

Wyeth’s kiss was a puzzle, and Worth spent most of his solitary luncheon in the library trying to decipher it when he should have been reading quarterly earnings statements.

She wasn’t a virgin with regard to kissing; he’d bet his honor on that. She’d been startled to find herself lip to lip with him, but then she’d been curious, and then she’d been interested, and then she’d been…
interesting
.

One kiss was obviously not enough. He must needs kiss her again, to see if that cool, cautious curiosity could be made to burn out of control. He would parse the taste of her down to something describable, not merely “lovely” or “delicious” or “womanly.”

Then there was the sound of kissing her. That soft indrawn breath of surprise, the sigh of acceptance, the hungry little moans in the back of her throat, the rustle and slide of her gown against his breeches, the almost-groan when she opened her mouth for him.

This great feast of the senses that was kissing her, he’d have it again.
They
would have it again, because if ever there was a woman from whom “no” meant “Absolutely Not Ever,” it was Jacaranda Wyeth, and not even her mouth had said no.

Her kiss—her very body—had said yes.

How long would it take for her mind to realize that?

* * *

The week went flying by for Jacaranda. She was dragooned into the tenant calls after lunch, and worse, into calls on neighbors. Mr. Kettering was as stealthy about his tactics as a drunken draft sow.

“Doesn’t the Damus holding lie between the Tarmans’ farm and Trysting?”

“Why don’t we nip in and say hello to the…Stevens? No, Steppins?”

“That’s Squire Brent’s place, isn’t it? I think Goliath could use a drink.”

And there she’d be, smiling and curtsying to the Damuses, the Steppins, and the Brents—and their myriad daughters.

“You are a fraud, Mr. Worth Kettering.” They were returning from a call on the Wilders, who were tenants of longstanding, and the Kerstings, local gentry whom Jacaranda knew mostly from market and churchyard pleasantries, though she could hardly keep straight the names of their four daughters—the twins were not identical, thank God.

“Fraud is a serious offense.” He steered Goliath around a turn in the lane. “In what regard do I stand accused?”

“You are afraid of young ladies.”

“Flat terrified. Will you take the reins for a moment?”

He handed her the ribbons before she could protest, and then she had to sidle closer to the middle of the seat in fairness to the horse.

“They can’t truss you up and drag you to the altar,” Jacaranda said. “This horse has a lovely mouth.”

“So do you.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your mouth is lovely, when you aren’t pinching up your lips to scold a defenseless single man for his perfectly understandable fears. The young girls can’t tie me up, but they can waylay me in the rose arbor, or stumble against my person in the garden, feel faint as we’re dancing at the local assembly. They know how to set tongues wagging, and many a man has been ruined for less.”

“You account yourself irresistible.” She didn’t bother keeping incredulity from her tone.

“I account a net worth of several hundred thousand and climbing irresistible.”

“Boasting of such a thing is vulgar.” They tooled along in silence for about a quarter mile. “Vulgar, but impressive.”

In truth, he’d been complaining more than boasting. Another quarter mile went by, and Jacaranda began to relax, because Goliath was as steady as he was magnificent.

“Is that why the opera dancers trust you? You’ve made yourself wealthy, so they conclude you can help them?”

“I don’t know why, but it’s like that story of the widow’s mite. Those ladies trust me with what little they have, and I will be God-damned if I’ll let it come to harm. The lordlings trying to stretch their quarterly allowance so they can gamble deeper and wench away every night don’t seem nearly as worthy of my attention.”

“Robin Hood, then, with a dash of arrogance thrown in.”