Devil in My Bed (2 page)

Perhaps it was true that widows were much less likely to be offended than wives or maidens.

She bent to dust off her skirt and his mouth went dry at the grace of her willowy form and the vulnerability of the dainty curls on the back of her neck. She seemed so fragile, so in need of rescue and protection. Yet when she straightened, her eyes were bright and her chin high and proud. “Your assistance is most appreciated, good sir.” With a brisk tug at the sleeves of her spencer and a swift maneuver of her fingers that swept her tousled hair neatly back into her bonnet, she removed all traces of her ordeal as if it had never happened.

As if he had never happened. She was preparing to walk away, he knew it. He ought to allow it, for he had no idea who or what she was. She was no one from his world, or he would have remembered her instantly. Just an ordinary woman in black, a war-time widow, as common in the city as ravens on the Tower of London. Yet, as she bobbed a quick curtsey and turned away, the words to stop her ripped from his throat through no will of his own.

“You ought never to walk alone.” God, he sounded breathless and frantic, even to himself!

She froze in place, as if his ridiculous words meant something in particular to her. Then she turned to send an oddly shy glance over her shoulder. “Perhaps you should always walk with me, then.” Her words were flirtatious, but her voice—ah, her voice was every bit as breathless and surprised as his own.

He’d tilted his head, a slow involuntary smile taking him over. “Perhaps I must.”

After that, his recollection of the day was a blur. A ride in his carriage through Hyde Park; a dinner in a private dining room of a restaurant; a walk down the Promenade in the dark, hours after everyone else had departed. They spoke of her childhood, of his friends, of her impressions of London, art, literature.

They laughed about the antics of the Prince Regent, whom he was personally acquainted with and had very good intelligence on. He never recalled the exact words they said, only the way the syllables rushed off their tongues as if they had years to make up for.

The moment that was most clear was the instant he turned to her in the dark carriage, well past the clock strike of four. “I ought to take you home,” he’d murmured regretfully.

Her ready, wanton reply surprised him.

“Yes, indeed. Won’t you join me for breakfast?”

His eyes widened and his jaw slacked a bit, but she only waited with a fierce glint in her eyes and her chin raised without shame while he recovered from his shock.

Fortunately, that didn’t take long. His brow smoothed and his lips twitched into a shy, boyish smile.

She sat back then, her wrap tight over her crossed arms. “And tell your man not to spare the whip,” she commanded archly, only to giggle when he laughed and pulled her close.

The kiss . . . ah, that memory was clear as crystal and just as shimmering. Her mouth was soft beneath his but not dormant. She kissed him back so wholeheartedly, as if she were determined to taste everything life had to offer her.

When he drew back at last, gasping and dizzy with her, she stayed still in his arms for a long, heated moment, her gaze lowered, her bravado abruptly gone.

He ran the backs of his knuckles down her cheek and nearly lost his breath at the silken heat of her skin.

“Are you real?”

She shook her head a little at that, almost a startled tremor. “I’m only . . . only Madeleine.”

He tipped her chin up with one finger and gazed down into her face. There was enough light for him to delight in the answering wonder in her eyes. “Correction,” he said. “You are only my Madeleine.”

Mine. Ridiculous, to make such a vow when he’d never seen her before this morning. Yet it was true.

She was, from that moment forward, always and forever his.

As often happens to a man who has everything when he is presented with the unattainable, Aidan de Quincy became infatuated.

He could not get enough of her. He could not make it through a single day without her in his arms. It should have appalled him, this hunger, yet it only made him ache for more.

For despite the freely given smiles and the sighs of pleasure, there was something within his Madeleine which he could not touch. He held her in his arms all night long, yet he sensed that he didn’t truly have her.

Trying to bring her closer only caused her to hold herself further away. Panicked by her stubborn coolness, one day he proposed. He tore his heart out of his chest and served it up on toast with her tea, offering her everything he had, everything he ever would have, if only she would be forever his. “I must have you for my very own!”

The moment the words left his lips, he felt the way her hands shrank within his. His impassioned grip tightened in protest, only a little, yet she gasped and tore herself from him.

As he watched in frozen, shattered rejection, she turned her back for a moment with her arms wrapped tightly about herself. Then she straightened, pushed back a fallen strand of dark hair with the back of one hand, and turned to him with a smile.

It was a false, shallow smile. He couldn’t see through to its true meaning, for her façade, brittle and sudden as it was, was complete. Horrified at the disappearance of his warm, lovely Madeline, he tried to persuade her to reconsider.

Her broken, artificial laughter sounded in his ears like shattering glass. “There’s no need to be so earnest, darling,” she told him with a little toss of her head. “We’re only having a bit of harmless fun.

There’s no need to ruin it with this ridiculous talk of marriage.”

Ridiculous. The word, the laughter, the bright spots of color in her white cheeks—the moment seared hotly into his mind and heart forever. She thought his passion was ridiculous.

He should leave. He should gather his shredded dignity about him and walk away.

Instead, in a strangled, helpless voice, he begged. When that moved her not at all, he pulled his grandmother’s ruby ring from his pocket and went down upon his knee. “My love, my darling—please!

Be mine forever!” Even as the pleading left his lips, he knew it was for naught. The look of appalled wariness in her eyes was all he needed to see.

He didn’t remember standing, just the agony in his chest that slowed his movements as if he moved underwater. He found himself in the entrance hall with his hat in his hand before he could take in enough air to speak to her again.

He turned to gaze at her coldly where she stood in the doorway of the tiny parlor where they had spent so many happy hours.

“In that case, madam, I have had my fill of harmless fun. Good-bye.”

A little more than three years and nine months later . . .

Gentlemen weren’t supposed to stare at ladies, but Aidan couldn’t help but stare at the female gracing the top step of his London club, shifting her bottom restlessly on the cold stone.

She was very pretty and very clean, if one ignored the smudge of city soot on her nose, so he had no objection there. No, the problem—if indeed there was one—was the lady’s maturity.

She looked to be no more than a very young three years of age.

Not quite the sight one expected—a tiny female person dwarfed by the imposing Georgian façade of Brown’s Club for Distinguished Gentlemen. Even the shuttered windows seemed to look down upon her with dour disapproval, just as the grand portico threatened to make a mouthful of her.

It was not as intimidating as the clubs known as Brooks or Boodles, though, fiercely Palladian structures that they were with their Grecian columns, standing down the more fashionable end of St. James Street.

No, Brown’s was like an old uncle, stout and brick-shaped and rather too fond of its port to be truly daunting. Brown’s hovered here, among the shops that sold fine tobacco and liquor, as if unwilling to trade proximity to its pleasures for a more fashionable address.

The club’s elegantly curved semicircle of steps were marble, and though they’d been scuffed into genteel fatigue by generations of “Distinguished Gentlemen,” Aidan would have comfortably wagered his grand estate of Blankenship that they had never before been used as a bench by a very small female person.

In general, Aidan avoided females of all sorts. As it was the week before the opening of Parliament, Aidan had with great relief left his mother in queenly solitude at the Blankenship estate. Usually if he took great care, he found that he could claim duty for a great part of the year. He traveled between his various estates and played his part in the House of Lords. He took care to avoid balls and house parties of any kind, for attendance would be construed by Lady Blankenship as consent to look for a bride. That was the very last thing on his mind.

Still, even a house party full of fawning debutantes and social-climbing Society mamas would be preferable to endless weeks of cool, impersonal conversation with the woman who had borne him but with whom he’d spent less than half an hour a day as a child.

Mother, unfortunately, had promised the London house to Aidan’s cousins, the Breedloves—whom his friend Jack had once dubbed “the Breed-loads”—for the introduction into Society of the eldest female offspring of that numerous brood.

The idea of such raucous company was nearly as repellent as the thought of spending a single further inert day with Lady Blankenship. For the sake of his own sanity, Aidan had taken himself off to live at his club for the duration of Parliament. Excellent Brown’s, that bastion of male solitude, devoted to life without women.

So here he stood, gazing at what should not have been there. Aidan was no longer one to mind someone else’s business for them, not even when that someone was only slightly higher than his knee.

After all, children were the province of women, and since Aidan didn’t care to complicate his life with one of those, this miniature, painfully neat female person could have nothing to do with him.

Still, he stopped as he came halfway up the stairs and stood there, gazing at the wee creature now at eye level. She gazed evenly back at him with eyes wide and bright blue. She sat primly on a sort of lumpy satchel with her plump little hands clasped about her knees and her feet neatly tucked together. Dark brown ringlets covered her head, bound by a blue ribbon that was a bit frayed at the ends. Her little face was round and pink, and her features rather indistinct in that childish way—not that he looked carefully at many children. Did he even know any children? He thought not.

He could have passed her easily, for her tiny figure didn’t block the way, yet he found himself unable to ignore her. He looked about but didn’t see any maternal sort of person nearby. At this time of early evening, the gentlemen of London had not yet begun to orbit their brandy bottles, and ladies . . . well, ladies were never a common sight on St. James.

There was no help for it. He was going to have to offer his assistance to a lady. How annoying. He tried so hard to avoid situations like these, for his knight errant days were long over.

He cleared his throat. How did one address such a person? “Er . . . child?” That didn’t sound too odd.

“Child, where is your mother?”

She didn’t change her even, cornflower gaze. “I don’t know.” She spoke clearly enough, her high voice lilting easily above the clatter of hooves and wheels on the cobbles behind him. St. James was a busy enough street, even this less fashionable end.

“You’ve lost your mother?”

She considered that for a moment, tilting her head slightly to one side. “I don’t have a mother. I have a Nurse Pruitt.”

“Did Nurse Pruitt lose you in the crowd?”

The little mite shook her head firmly. “No. She didn’t lose me. I held her hand all the way.”

Aidan did not allow a fragment of his frustration to show. “All the way to where?”

She drew her brows together again, this time in a way that implied that he wasn’t very bright. “To here.”

“Here? Brown’s Club for Distinguished Gentlemen?”

She looked a bit unsure at the full title of the establishment. “My papa is in there.” She pointed over her shoulder at the once-grand, now somewhat-outdated entrance of Brown’s. “He’s going to take me home and give me a kitten.” She plunked her chin down on her clasped hands. “A white kitten,” she informed him in a confidential tone.

“Ah.” Excellent. No rescue needed. If her father was a servant in the club, the fellow couldn’t very well bring his child to work with him. She didn’t seem to be in any danger waiting out here on a sunny afternoon and he supposed it was preferable to the alley.

“Then if you’ll excuse me, miss.” Out of habit, he bowed, lifting his hat. Catching himself, he straightened. To a child! He really had no idea how to deal with children.

Yet she gurgled a charming laugh in response, making his lips twitch. “You’re a funny man,” she said.

He grunted. “You are the first and only person to tell me that.” Well, there had been one person to laugh at him in the past, but she was long gone. Now the world treated him with distant respect, just the way he preferred. Even so, he could still hear that rising peal of delight, playfully mocking, yet fond.

She’d found him so amusing, mostly when he wasn’t trying to be.

Old thoughts, old pain. Nothing to do with the present. Nothing at all.

“Really, Blankenship, have the courtesy not to block the steps with your extreme lordliness.” The mocking voice was familiar and very unwelcome.

Colin. Bloody hell.

Tall, lean, and as fair as he himself was dark, Sir Colin Lambert was an annoying complication in Aidan’s otherwise smooth existence. Unfortunately, Colin came attached to Aidan’s close friend, Jack. Since their days at school, Colin had made it his business to needle Aidan as much as possible.

With a barely concealed grimace, Aidan turned to Colin. “I am attempting to assess a delicate situation.”

“You? That’s like asking a blacksmith to take out a splinter.” Colin took a knee on the steps to make himself eye level to the little mite.

Of course, Aidan thought, that’s what one does with children. He was both relieved that Colin seemed to know what to do with the creature and annoyed that Colin seemed to be making a better job of it than he.