Dreaming (5 page)

He gave a wry laugh. “That, Miss Hornsby, is the ultimate in understatement.”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” she said with a sigh. “But since we are going to be together, I think we shouldn’t worry about formalities. You should call me ‘
Letty
’ or ‘
Letitia
,’ although I prefer ‘
Letty
,’ but not ‘Olive.’ I cannot abide that name. But ‘
Letty
’ is just fine.” What she really wanted was to tell him to call her “hellion,” but she didn’t have the courage to let him know how much that name meant to her. She waited for him to say something.

He didn’t say anything, just looked at her the way Cook looked at a fallen soufflé.

She cocked her head and said, “Please . . . my lord?”

He turned away and rubbed his head “Fine,” he said shortly.

She smiled, then waited for him to speak. He said nothing. After her season, short as it was, she had decided that men were not mind readers at all. And ladies were expected to be patient. She was certain that it was a man who coined the phrase patience is a virtue—a way of keeping it a man’s world by fooling women into waiting patiently for love until they, the men, deigned to succumb.

But patience was not part of her. The times she’d been patient, waiting for something to happen, the world went round and round, but without her. For
Letty
, patience was the same as allowing herself and her dreams to fade into nothing.

She watched him a moment longer, then gave up and said, “Considering the rules of etiquette, I suppose I should continue to defer to your title and say ‘my lord.’ But you’ve hardly been a lord very long, barely two years, and besides which, I heard that you didn’t want to be a lord at all.” She took another breath.

He shook his head, then gave her look of astonishment.

The perfect chance for her to make her point. “But since you didn’t want to be one—an earl, that is—I shall call you ‘Richard.’ ”

Gus snarled.

She turned and shook a finger at him. “You be a sweet dog!”

A loud choking snort came from Richard’s direction.

She turned back around.

He scowled at Gus, who grumbled and scowled back.

“Gus . . . it’s not polite to growl every time you hear his name.”

Gus looked at Richard, barked once, then flopped his head on his paws and just watched them.

Letty
turned back to Richard and gave him a tentative smile, hoping he’d return it. She had no idea that her eyes gave away her heart.

His expression was that of a man suffering. He had taken quite a nasty fall. “I’m sorry your head pains you.”

He gave her an indefinable look, then turned his gaze on the locked door for long minutes, during which her smile slowly died. Finally, when he turned, his gaze swept over her, then shifted to Gus.

Richard shuddered slightly, which she attributed to the dampness of the ship, then sat there for a long time, looking at the dark walls of the cargo hold, eyeing the wooden barrels and crates stacked nearby, then staring at the bolted door.

A full minute passed before he glared up at the ship beams overhead and said, “To think they say You are a kind God.”

She was unsure how he meant his words. And after a moment, very quietly, she said, “God is kind.”

Richard gave her a look of male bewilderment.

She smiled warmly, then added with bright and simple honesty, “Very kind. You see . . . He gave me you.”

Chapter 2

A gift from God. She actually believed that balderdash. He pinned her with a hard stare. She smiled as if it was endearing.

He closed his eyes and was instantly aware that his head pounded. Which wasn’t surprising. He’d fallen on it.

While his friends might have suggested that his body was rebelling against all the brandy he’d dumped into it, he knew differently. With the stubbornness of an English ox, he looked at the hellion’s face and rationalized that she could give anyone a headache.

Here they were, locked in the hold of a smugglers’ ship, probably on their way to
France
, where Napoleon was on the loose and once again advocating war. Meanwhile the hellion sat only a few feet away with her hands properly folded in her lap, babbling about gifts from God and chattering niceties as if they were about to have tea.

Quite the image. He watched her shake the sand from the soiled hem of her blue dress. Her cloak hung off one shoulder and her nut-brown hair had fallen down into a wild and curly mass. It looked as tangled as her thinking.

And he was more than familiar with how her mind worked. Her infatuation with him had been blatant, and nothing but trouble: spying on him from trees, rescuing him from duels, concocting situations that her furtive mind had thought would impress him. She was a tenacious thing.

He glanced back at her and saw what he didn’t want to see: her heart laid open. And it made him more uncomfortable than crossing paths with the most blatant of
London
flirts. Yet unlike those experienced flirts, there was no guile to her look, no all-too-familiar come-hither expression that most Englishwomen practiced for long hours in front of a mirror, and most Englishmen played to their best advantage.

She was ignorant of those games, and he didn’t know how to play her. Her face held no secrets, and he didn’t care for what he read in it. Adoration. Innocence and honesty. She was too honest, too sincere, traits that were foreign to English society.

Honesty had been at the root of one of the first ripples of gossip she’d created by walking innocently up to her aunt during a card party and announcing to the whole table that she thought
Almack’s
was dull as dry toast and that Sally Jersey, while certainly a bit of a tragedy queen, wasn’t half as ill bred and despotic as her aunt had implied. Lady Jersey had been playing at the card table behind her.

The hellion had only voiced aloud what everyone else thought but never dared say. They chose not to welcome her, because she didn’t fit into society’s accepted mold.

Now there was an interesting image, he thought wryly. The Hornsby hellion in a mold. She’d probably break the blasted thing, and if it was heavy—enormously heavy—he had no doubt it would somehow land on him.

He turned his gaze to her and was struck by the contrast between what he saw and what he knew. Sitting there as she was, with her feelings bared for all the world to see, no one would ever believe that she could wreak such havoc.

But she could. Had. And probably would, perhaps before the day was out.

He looked around the hold again, then said, “Miss Hornsby . . . ”

She glanced up and smiled. “
Letty
.”

“
Letty
. How long have we been locked in here?”

“I’m not certain. Perhaps an hour. Why?”

He rubbed his chin thoughtfully, looking for some way to escape. “I’m trying to figure how far out into the Channel we are.”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been on a ship.” Her voice lowered to a furtive whisper. “Especially a smugglers’ ship.”

“I think they know we’re down here, so you needn’t whisper.” Shaking his head, he turned his attention to the rafters, looking for a trap. All he saw was an expanse of wood darkened by dampness and time.

“Don’t you think this is exciting?”

“No.”

“Oh.” Her voice trailed off. “Well, I certainly think it’s exciting.”

He stopped his search and looked at her. “I fail to see how you can find this exciting.”

“Oh, well, to me it is. Rather like a novel come to life. A true adventure. Why, we could be Tristan and
Isolde
, Robinson Crusoe and Friday, almost any romantic characters. Now do you see what I mean?”

“No.”

She tilted her head as if she were trying to understand him. Hell, he didn’t understand himself. After a pause she added, “I suppose that’s because you’re a man.”

“And what’s wrong with being a man?”

“There is nothing wrong with being a man,” she said bluntly. “However, it’s been my experience that sometimes men are not too perceptive.”

“Your experience?” There was a sardonic bite to his voice.

“Oh, now I’ve offended you, haven’t I? I never meant to imply there was anything
wrong
with men. They can be perfectly wonderful. Our monarch is a man. Well, I suppose that’s not the best example of ‘wonderful,’ is it? And the Regent . . . ” She clapped her mouth closed and flushed. The look he knew so well. There was a commonly used saying for guilt: a hangman’s hands. The hellion had hangman’s face.

“Vauxhall,” he said.

She looked as if she wanted to fade into the wood. “Were you there?”

“No, but half of society was.”

“It was just horrid.”

“Yes. I suppose it was.”

She looked up at him with a question in her eyes. “I have never quite understood how, with such a bevy of valets to help one dress, His Majesty’s stay strings could have possibly trailed behind him like they did. I do believe almost anyone could have happened along and stepped on them. To this day I don’t which was louder, the Regent’s shouts or the cry of springing stays and rending velvet.”

The incident had been the brunt of more jests than Richard could count, the two most memorable of which were published in the
Times
: “Ode to a Bungling Miss” and a parody on
Milton
titled “Clad in Naked Majesty.”

She turned silent, her discourse on men and heroes and royalty thrust away by the unpleasant memories of her failure. He wondered what went through her mind when she thought about
London
or her season.

Looking at her left him with a sense of awkwardness that was unknown to him. He had thought his cynicism and his long association with every side of society had equipped him to handle most any situation.

Yet he could still remember the gleam of anticipation and excitement he’d seen in her eyes at that first ball, and he knew that all of the social functions that had grown so tiresome to him were of supreme importance to her.

He knew enough of females to understand that they saw balls and parties and teas in a different light than did males.

In retrospect, he supposed that was why he’d danced with her. She had looked as if she desperately needed a dance. And now she still looked as if she were in desperate need of something.

But he was no knight to slay dragons, no guardian angel there to make her dreams come true. He turned away, choosing to go on with his search of the hold. But a few quiet minutes of searching gave him no means of escape, so he started to walk across the room. The rustle of her skirts stopped him, and he turned.

She was looking at him as if she were a soap bubble ready to burst. He leaned one shoulder against a wall and crossed his arms, instinct telling him this would take a while. “I take it from that expression that you have something to say.”

She gave him a tentative look, then nodded.

He waved one hand. “Go ahead.”

Her demeanor said this was very important to her.

She chewed on her lip an extra second, then took one long breath and raised her worried face toward his. “I was wondering why you haven’t come home for so long.”

That was not the question he had expected, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to answer it. Truth was, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to come back since he buried his brother and father.

“Home” she had called it, but Lockett Manor was not home. It was his father’s house. His brother’s house. But it wasn’t home, which is why he’d not come back until last night.

And then he’d come back because the only two men of any importance to his wretched excuse of a life—his friends
Belmore
and Seymour—had both challenged him to do so with the comment that he’d better bury old ghosts before he bloody well buried himself.

He stared at her bowed head and thought of how to answer her. He came up with nothing polite enough for her innocent ears. She still hadn’t looked at him but fiddled instead with some flowers on the hem of her dress.