Almost Heaven (24 page)

“A wheeled conveyance brought us most of the way,” she prevaricated, seizing on Lucinda’s earlier explanation, “and it’s gone on now.” She saw his eyes narrow with angry disgust as he realized he was stuck with them unless he wanted to spend several days escorting them back to the inn.

Terrified that the tears burning the backs of her eyes were going to fall, Elizabeth tipped her head back and turned it, pretending to be inspecting the ceiling, the staircase, the walls, anything. Through the haze of tears she noticed for the first time that the place looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in a year.

Beside her Lucinda glanced around through narrowed eyes and arrived at the same conclusion.

Jake, anticipating that the old woman was about to make some disparaging comment about Ian’s house, leapt into the breach with forced joviality.

“Well, now,” he burst out, rubbing his hands together and striding forward to the fire. “Now that’s all settled, shall we all be properly introduced? Then we’ll see about supper.” He looked expectantly at Ian, waiting for him to handle the introductions, but instead of doing the thing properly he merely nodded curtly to the beautiful blond girl and said, “Elizabeth Cameron – Jake Wiley.”

“How do you do, Mr. Wiley,” Elizabeth said.

“Call me Jake,” he said cheerfully, then he turned expectantly to the scowling duenna. “And you are?”

Fearing that Lucinda was about to rip up at Ian for his cavalier handling of the introductions, Elizabeth hastily said, “This is my companion, Miss Lucinda Throckmorton-Jones.”

“Good heavens! Two names. Well, no need to stand on formality, since we’re going to be cooped up together for at least a few days! Just call me Jake. What shall I call you?”

“You may call me Miss Throckmorton-Jones,” she informed him, looking down the length of her beaklike nose.

“Er-very well,” he replied, casting an anxious look of appeal to Ian, who seemed to be momentarily enjoying Jake’s futile efforts to create an atmosphere of conviviality. Disconcerted, Jake ran his hands through his disheveled hair and arranged a forced smile on his face. Nervously, he gestured about the untidy room. “Well, now, if we’d known we were going to have such . . . ah . . . gra . . . that is, illustrious company, we’d have –”

“Swept off the chairs?” Lucinda suggested acidly. “Shoveled off the floor?”  

“Lucinda!” Elizabeth whispered desperately. “They didn’t know we were coming.”

“No respectable person would dwell in such a place even for a night,” she snapped, and Elizabeth watched in mingled distress and admiration as the redoubtable woman turned around and directed her attack on their unwilling host. “The responsibility for our being here is yours, whether it was a mistake or not! I shall expect you to rout your servants from their hiding places and have them bring clean linens up to us at once. I shall also expect them to have this squalor remedied by morning! It is obvious from your behavior that you are no gentleman; however,
we
are ladies, and we shall expect to be treated as such.”

From the corner of her eye Elizabeth had been watching Ian Thornton, who was listening to all of this, his jaw rigid, a muscle beginning to twitch dangerously in the side of his neck.

Lucinda, however, was either unaware of or unconcerned with his reaction, for, as she picked up her skirts and turned toward the stairs, she turned on Jake. “You may show us to our chambers. We wish to retire.”

“Retire?” cried Jake, thunderstruck. “But-but what about supper?” he sputtered.

“You may bring it up to us.” Elizabeth saw the blank look on Jake’s face, and she endeavored to translate, politely, what the irate woman was saying to the startled red-haired man.

“What Miss Throckmorton-Jones means is that we’re rather exhausted from our trip and not very good company, sir, and so we prefer to dine in our rooms.”

“You will dine,” Ian Thornton said in an awful voice that made Elizabeth freeze, “on what
you
cook for yourself, madam. If you want clean linens, you’ll get them yourself from the cabinet. If you want clean rooms, clean them! Am I making myself clear?”

“Perfectly.” Elizabeth began furiously, but Lucinda interrupted in a voice shaking with ire: “Are you suggesting, sirrah, that we are to do the work of servants?”

Ian’s experience with the
ton
and with Elizabeth had given him a lively contempt for ambitious, shallow, self-indulgent young women whose single goal in life was to acquire as many gowns and jewels as possible with the least amount of effort, and he aimed his attack at Elizabeth. “I am suggesting that you look after yourself for the first time in your silly, aimless life. In return for that, I am willing to give you a roof over your head and to share our food with you until I can get you to the village. lf that is too overwhelming a task for you, then my original invitation still stands: There’s the door. Use it!”

Elizabeth knew the man was irrational, and it wasn’t worth riling herself to reply to him, so she turned instead to Lucinda. “Lucinda,” she said with weary resignation, “do not upset yourself by trying to make Mr. Thornton understand that
his
mistake has inconvenienced
us,
not the other way around. You will only waste your time. A gentleman of breeding would be perfectly able to understand that he should be apologizing instead of ranting and raving. However, as I told you before we came here, Mr. Thornton is no gentleman. The simple fact is that he enjoys humiliating people, and he will continue trying to humiliate us for as long as we stand here.”

Elizabeth cast a look of well-bred disdain over Ian and said, “Good night, Mr. Thornton.” Turning, she softened her voice a little and said, “Good evening, Mr. Wiley.”

When the ladies had both retired to their bedchambers Jake wandered over to the table and rummaged through the provisions. Taking out some cheese and bread, he listened to the sounds of their footsteps on the wooden floor as they went about opening cabinets and making up their beds. When he’d finished eating he had two glasses of Madeira, then he glanced at Ian. “You ought to eat something,” he said.

“I’m not hungry,” his friend replied shortly. Jake’s eyes filled with puzzlement as he gazed at the enigmatic man who was staring out the window into the darkness, his profile taut.

Although there had been no sounds of movement from the bedchambers above for the last half hour, Jake felt guilty that the ladies hadn’t eaten. Hesitantly, he said, “Shall I bring some of this up to them?”

“No,” Ian said “If they want to eat, they can damn well come down here and feed themselves.”

“We’re not being very hospitable to ‘em, Ian.”

“Not hospitable?” he repeated with a sarcastic glance over his shoulder. “In case you haven’t realized it; they’ve taken two of the bedchambers, which means one of us will be sleeping on the sofa tonight.”

“The sofa’s too short. I’d sleep out in the barn, like I used to do. Don’t mind it a bit. I like the way hay smells, and it’s soft. Your caretaker’s brought up a cow and some chickens, just like the note said, so we’d have fresh milk and eggs. Looks to me like the only thing he didn’t do was have someone clean this place up.”

When Ian made no reply to that but continued staring off into the dark, Jake said hesitantly, “Would you be willing to tell me how the ladies came to be here? I mean, who are they?”

Ian drew a long, impatient breath, tipped his head back, and absently massaged the muscles at the back of his neck. “I met Elizabeth a year and a half ago at a party. She’d just made her debut, was already betrothed to some unfortunate nobleman, and was eager to test her wiles on me.”

“Test her wiles on you? I thought you said she was engaged to another.”

Sighing irritably at his friend’s naiveté, Ian said curtly, “Debutantes are a different breed from any women you’ve known. Twice a year their mamas bring them to London to make their debut. They’re paraded about during the Season like horses at an auction, then their parents sell them as wives to whoever bids the highest. The winning bidder is selected by the expedient measure of choosing whoever has the most important title and the most money.”

“Barbaric!” said Jake indignantly.

Ian shot him an ironic look. “Don’t waste your pity. It suits them perfectly. All they want from marriage is jewels, gowns, and the freedom to have discreet liaisons with whomever they please, once they produce the requisite heir. They’ve no notion of fidelity or honest human feeling.”

Jake’s brows lifted at that. “Can’t say as I ever noticed you took the petticoat set in aversion,” he remarked, thinking of the women who’d warmed Ian’s bed in the last two years some with titles of their own.

“Speaking of debutantes,” Jake continued cautiously when Ian remained silent, “what about the one upstairs? Do you dislike her especially, or just on general principle?”

Ian walked over to the table and poured some Scotch into a glass. He took a swallow, shrugged, and said, “Miss Cameron was more inventive than some of her vapid little friends. She accosted me in a garden at a party.”

“I can see how bothersome that musta been,” Jake joked, “having someone like her, with a face that men dream about, tryin’ to seduce you, usin’ feminine wiles on you. Did they work?”

Slamming the glass down on the table, Ian said curtly, “They worked.” Coldly dismissing Elizabeth from his mind, be opened the deerskin case on the table, removed some papers he needed to review, and sat down in front of the fire.

Trying to suppress his avid curiosity, Jake waited a few minutes before asking, “Then what happened?”

Already engrossed in reading the documents in his hand, Ian said absently and without looking up, “I asked her to marry me; she sent me a note inviting me to meet her in the greenhouse; I went there; her brother barged in on us and informed me she was a countess, and that she was already betrothed.”

The topic thrust from his mind, Ian reached for the quill lying on the small table beside his chair and made a note in the margin of the contract.

“And?”
Jake demanded avidly.

“And what?”

“And
then
what happened – after the brother barged in?”

“He took exception to my having contemplated marrying so far above myself and challenged me to a duel,” Ian replied in a preoccupied voice as he made another note on the contract.

“So what’s the girl doin’ here now?” Jake asked, scratching his head in bafflement over the doings of the Quality.

“Who the hell knows,” Ian murmured irritably. “Based on her behavior with me, my guess is she finally got caught in some sleazy affair or another, and her reputation’s beyond repair.”

“What’s that got to do with you?” Ian expelled his breath in a long, irritated sigh and glanced at Jake with an expression that made it clear he was finished answering questions.

“I assume,” he bit out, “that her family, recalling my absurd obsession with her two years ago, hoped I’d come up to scratch again and take her off their hands.”

“You think it’s got somethin’ to do with the old duke ‘talking about you bein’ his natural grandson and wantin’ to make you his heir?” He waited expectantly, hoping for more information, but Ian ignored him, reading his documents. Left with no other choice and no prospect for further confidences, Jake picked up a candle, gathered up some blankets, and started for the barn. He paused at the door, Struck by a sudden thought. “She said she didn’t send you any note about meetin’ her in the greenhouse.”

“She’s a liar and an excellent little actress,” Ian said icily, without taking his gaze from the papers. “Tomorrow I’ll think of some way to get her out of here and off my hands.”

Something in Ian’s face made Jake ask, “Why the hurry? You afraid of fallin’ fer her wiles again?”

“Hardly.”

“Then you must be made of stone,” he teased. “That woman’s so beautiful she’d tempt any man who was alone with her for an hour includin’ me, and you know I ain’t in the petticoat line at all.”

“Don’t let her catch you alone,” Ian replied mildly.

“I don’t think I’d mind.” Jake laughed as he left.

Upstairs in the bedchamber at the end of the hall over the kitchen, Elizabeth had wearily pulled off her clothes, climbed into bed, and fallen into an exhausted slumber.

In the bedchamber that opened off the landing above the parlor where the two men talked, Lucinda Throckmorton-Jones had seen no reason to break her normal retiring routine. Refusing to yield to weariness merely because she’d been jounced about on the back of a wagon, ignobly ejected from a dirty cottage into the rain, where she’d contemplated the feeding habits of predatory beasts, and then been rudely forced to retire without so much as a morsel of bread for sustenance, she nevertheless prepared for bed exactly as she would have done had she spent the day over her embroidery. After removing and folding her black bombazine gown she had unpinned her hair, given it the requisite one hundred slow strokes, and then carefully braided it and tucked it beneath her white nightcap.

Two things, however, put Lucinda so out of countenance that once she had climbed into bed and pulled the scratchy blankets up to her chin she actually could not sleep. First and foremost, there had not been a ewer and basin in her crude bedchamber that she could use to wash her face and body, which she always did before retiring. Second, the bed upon which her bony frame was expected to repose had lumps in it.