A Proper Mistress (21 page)

Every other painting seemed to be of a horse or a dog. She soon grew tired of reading the brass plates that gave their names and sometimes their pedigrees. The people in the paintings seemed not to deserve any such notice—or perhaps it was assumed that anyone looking at them would know who they were. Most had the look of Winslows—straight, autocratic noses, tall foreheads, stubborn chins, and a good number of them with those startling blue eyes.

None as handsome as Theo, however.

When she tired of walking, she made her way to a room that had a number of books. Not so many as to be called a library, but more than in the rest of the house that she had seen. Her education had not been overlooked at St. Marylebone's—numbers and reading were taught to everyone, as was a careful hand. However, the only reading encouraged had been the bible for books were dear to buy, as was a subscription to a lending library.

However, Sallie considered it part of her calling for all her girls to be able to carry on a conversation about anything that might interest a gentleman, including politics, literature, and history even. To that end, on Sunday afternoons Sallie read from every fashionable work she could find, and encouraged lively discussions after.

Molly had often taken away the books to read on her own.

Now, as she searched for something to interest, all she found were books and magazines on hunting, shooting, boxing, fishing and the occasional thick volume with a long title that seemed to deal with farming.

Theo found her still prowling the room, searching the shelves.

"What in blazes are you doing?" he asked.

She had climbed up onto a chair in order to see the titles of the works on the higher shelves. Glancing down at him, she said, "Don't you have anything to read that doesn't involve either killing some animal or digging up the ground?"

One black eyebrow lifted and he said, scorn thick in his tone, "Read? I thought we were having a picnic?"

She started to climb down from the chair, but he came to her and put his hands on her waist, holding her in place. With her feet sinking into the soft cushions of the chair, she stood just a little taller than him.

"I think I like having you look up to me," she said, unable to resist teasing him, and her pulse quickening at his touch.

"So it's a pedestal you want after all? Shall I get you a proper one—all white marble and high enough that I can kiss your toes?"

She wrinkled her nose. "I don't aim for great heights."

"But you might like your toes being kissed and nibbled on."

Pulling back, she tilted her head to the side. "It sounds a bit ticklish."

"And is this ticklish?" he asked. He pulled her close to kiss the hollow of her throat.

Closing her eyes, she leaned into the sensation. She straightened with a reminder to think about her fifty pounds. "Here now—I thought you said something about a picnic?"

He pulled away with a grin, his eyes sparkling with mischief. "I'm going to have to start calling you my hungry Molly—how can you eat like a trencher and not weigh in at twenty stone?"

"I don't eat like a trencher. But I could just now."

With a laugh, he took hold of her waist, swung her off the chair and once around before setting her on the ground. She clutched his neck, half out of breath from the surprise of it.

"You
are
a dangerous fellow!"

He flicked her chin with a finger. "Not a bit—tame as a lamb. Now, I've promised you a picnic, and it's a picnic you shall have."

She glanced at the windows as he started to lead her from the room. "We'll be soaked through."

With a grin, he kept hold of her hand and started up the stairs. "So little faith. Close your eyes. Come along—closed, I said. You'll have hold tight and trust me."

"I already do too much," she muttered, but she shut her eyes tight.

Where he led her, she could not tell. She lost track after the stairs turned twice, and it seemed to be ages down a corridor that smelled musty from lack of use. She heard a door creak open and closed behind her. Her nose twitched with the wafting scents of food—curry, she thought. And a pork pie, and roast...roast what? Ah, pheasant.

She could have stood there all day with her eyes shut, breathing those tantalizing aromas.

Taking her shoulders, he turned her about. Standing behind her, he leaned close and whispered to her, "Now you may look."

Theo had spent the morning arranging this, and now he waited for Molly's reaction, more eager than he would ever have thought possible. His father had kept him up late last night with excuses of estate business—and he had actually found himself growing interested in the details of managing the four-hundred and sixty acres that comprised Winslow Park. Twice he'd had to stop himself from making suggestions on perhaps crossing some Romneys with their Dorset Horn sheep to improve the wool yield, or to see about replanting the aging apple orchards that lay to the south and with an eye to selling the extra cider production.

All that was Terrance's proper business—not his. These would be Terrance's lands someday. And he was not going to be lured into thinking them his properties. No, but someday he would...

His thoughts had snagged there. Just what would he do someday?

He had gone to bed grumpy—and without any reason for his snarling mood—his head too full of the brandy his father had kept pouring for them both. Restless, unable to sleep, he had prowled to his mother's deserted rooms—and he had stood there with a candle, looking about him without even knowing what he was looking for. His past? Or his future?

Blazes, it was all nonsense—but he had felt better after staring at the miniature of her that he had found tucked into her wardrobe, along with a few other personal items, including the pearls she had once worn. He'd been able to seek his own bed.

And he had woken to the depressing sight of rain.

That galvanized him.

It was one bloody thing to have his schemes run into thick cover due to his father's bullheaded unwillingness to admit he'd been bested, but he was not about to see his plans for Molly ruined today by bloody rain.

So he had had the picnic settled into the old nursery.

He leaned close to her now—the scent of something flowery carried to him from her skin. "This used to be Sherwood Forest, and the Island of Madagascar—don't know why, but Terrance liked the name of the place—and just about anywhere else on a rainy day. So I thought it would do well enough for our picnic."

She glanced at him, eyes glowing, and he suddenly wanted to wrap his arms around her to bury his face in that mass of red hair as he would if she were a rose. "Oh, Theo, it's perfect."

With a shrug, he folded his hands behind him. He'd never felt awkward with a female before, but somehow the pleasure in her face, while it pleased him, also left him uncertain what to do.

"I thought the potted palms a nice touch," he said, and gestured to the plants he'd had brought up from the old conservatory. No one ever used it anymore—not since his mother had died. But the staff still maintained the plants, as they did everything else in the house.

Turning, she smiled up at him. "You're wonderful." Standing on tiptoe, she brushed a kiss on his cheek.

His face warmed as if it were his first kiss, and a different hunger blazed loose in him.

But she had hold of his hand now and was tugging him forward. "We shall sit on pillows—that's how the rajas eat in India, you know. Sprawling in luxury on silken cushions."

"Blazes, that reminds me." He tugged out from her hold and slipped his hand into his waistcoat pocket. "I want you to wear these."

Molly gasped as he pulled out a strand of pearls and a pair of earrings. Her eyes widened and she pulled back a little.

"What—don't you like them?" he asked. "They were my mother's. Her favorites I think.

She shook her head, red curls bobbing. "Oh, I couldn't."

"Of course you can."

"But your father..."

He let out an exasperated sigh. "That's the whole point. He's playing it cagey—wants to see if I mean anything earnest by you or not. This should show him I mean business."

Stepping closer, his jaw set, he fastened the necklace around Molly's neck. She knew better than to argue with him when he had that look on his face—she would only be wasting breath. He stepped back to admire the effect, and she touched a hand to the strands, self-conscious about it in a way she had not been about the ring and bracelet he had given her.

These, after all, had been his mother's. What would the squire think to see them on her?

Theo frowned at her. "They're a bit dull, aren't they?"

Automatically, she answered. "Pearls have to be worn—they take their sheen from the oils of your skin. That's what Sallie says."

A smile edged up Theo's mouth. "When it comes to jewels, I'd wager Sallie knows what she's talking about. Now, I thought you said you were hungry?"

He gave her the pearl earrings to put on and, with only a moment's hesitation, she took them. No mirror hung in this room—it wasn't a thing she could imagine that two boys had ever needed—but she managed without it.

Seated on the floor with him—with her skin warming the pearls—she decided she had indeed stepped into a moment of fantasy. And she'd enjoy to the maximum.

Theo began to serve a plate for her, piling on the food.

His Molly looked a right treat, Theo decided, what with the pearl starting to gleam, and with that flush of pleasure still on her cheeks. He served her from every dish laid out, and spent more time listening to her exclaim over the food than anything else.

She had slipped into her proper accent, almost as if that was more natural to her than were her low-bred tones. A bit of pretend, perhaps, to go with this room of childhood dreams. And that stared him thinking of her stories.

"Did you actually grow up in India?" he asked, for she had been talking of the food there as if she knew it well.

She nodded, her mouth full at the moment with pastry. With a smile, he flicked the crumbs from her lower lip.

"How in blazes did you ever get to Sallie's house from there?"

Molly stared at him a moment. She took a swallow of wine to clear her throat, and took a second swallow to keep the entire truth from spilling out. Telling him of her path to being a cook in a house of harlots, with a stop in a workhouse, would only spoil the moment, so she drank her wine and put on a smile. "Oh, it's a long story."

He stretched out on the floor, one elbow resting on a pillow, his legs impossibly long. "We've all day."

Blinking, she stared at him. She pulled in a breath and started sketching her past—just fragments really. How her father had been posted to India with the army, and had taken her and her mother with him. Her parent's death from cholera, her Uncle Fred taking her in.

"That's where I got my interest in cooking, you see, for he had finicky tastes—he liked that saying of an army traveling on its stomach, which is why he said it was no use traveling anywhere in India, for there was nothing but rice fit to eat."

"And just how old were you when he 'took you in'?" Theo asked, an odd light in his eyes.

She glanced at him—he sounded almost, well, hostile about her uncle. "Eight or nine. For I was almost twelve when the fever took him. It was going through Fort George in Madras like a hot wind. And when he realized he wasn't going to recover, he booked passage to England for me, then wrote my mother's people to meet me—only they never did."

He frowned, and she almost smiled at his expression. It did sound dramatic, she supposed, but it had all seemed so very long ago, and almost as if it had happened in a different lifetime.

"Didn't you have their direction from your uncle?" he asked.

Thinking of how badly prepared she had been—with that scrawl of a note from Uncle Fred, for the fever had had him by then, no money really for it had been spent on her passage, and with only the very few things her parents had left her—she gave a shrug. She had indeed set off for England with nothing more than hope. However, she had also long ago given up the game of 'if only.'

"I did," she said. "They wrote letters at the workhouse to the address I gave, but the answer came back that no knew any Captain or Amelia Sweet. Or perhaps no one wanted to know. There'd been a rift of some sort, and either it ran too deep, or they'd moved on without a thought to her."