How to Master Your Marquis (19 page)

But Hatherfield, as always, refused to rise to the bait. He only smiled again, that patient smile, and looked at her wisely. “Stefanie, you know better than that.” He released her shoulders and turned to the wall of boats. “Now come along.”

“Come along?”

“Help me pick out a boat and an extra pair of blades.”

Stefanie’s blood ran cold. “An extra pair of blades?”

“Oh yes. I can’t leave you alone and unprotected in the boathouse at this hour of the day, assassins on the loose and all that. You, my dear, are about to learn how to stroke a pair.”

S
he wasn’t bad, not at all. A quick learner, Stefanie, but then he’d known that already. Once he showed her the basic motion, she dug right in and pulled her weight; a little awkward and inefficient in her deployment of the oars, of course, but at an innate and steady rhythm, matching him stroke for stroke.

He didn’t take her out far—for one thing, they’d wasted enough time in the boathouse, and for another, she wasn’t exactly in condition for it. At Hammersmith Bridge he turned them around, laying his right blade in the water as the boat swung a pitching arc in the frigid river.

“How are you doing?” he said, watching her back carefully. He had bundled her up against the frozen February air in a thick wool jumper and gloves, but he could still see the movement of her respiration, the faint white puffs as they left her mouth.

“Quite well!” she gasped. She was breathing hard, but not quite labored. Hanging in gamely.

“You’re looking jolly tolerable. Are you certain you haven’t done this before?”

She shook her head. “Just rowing about in the Holsteinsee with Emilie during the summer.”

He steadied the boat in the water. “Look there. No, the other bank. That row of buildings, to the left of the bridge. Do you see them?”

She peered into the shadows. “I think so. By the gas lamps?”

“That’s the one.”

“They look a bit skeletal, don’t you think?”

“They’re not finished yet.” He wrapped his hand more snugly around the oars. “They’re mine, in fact.”

“Yours!”

“An investment project. My mother’s money. It was part of her marriage settlement; it went into a trust for her children upon her death. There was only me, of course, so I came into it on my twenty-fifth birthday, and . . . well, there you have it.” He watched her face anxiously.

“But that’s marvelous! Look at them!”

“Yes, they’re coming along nicely. We tore down a row of damned slap-up jobs, a slum really. There are plenty of luxury developments out there, and then cheap rubbish for everybody else, but I wanted something different. Something of genuine quality for the middle classes, in an area close to town, convenient and well situated and all that, but not what you’d call exactly fashionable.” The boat was drifting upstream in the rush of tide; he made a few quick strokes. He added, almost under his breath, “Yet.”

“But why? Why go to such trouble?”

He skimmed the water. “Because I had to, I suppose.”

“Had to? But you’re heir to a dukedom.”

“That’s exactly why I had to. Because the dukedom’s a shambles. I don’t suppose you know our history, but the Southam title, it was legendary once. And then my grandfather mismanaged things, and my father made it worse, and now it’s all mortgages and falling rents and idiocy. I want . . .” He stared at the dim blur of the rooflines. “I want to save it. I know how to save it, I
will
save it. Build and sell these houses, and more like them, and I can reverse the tide. I can give our—I can give my children a name to be proud of. An inheritance worth inheriting.”

The water slapped against the boat. A shrill whistle carried across the bank, a boatman preparing to cast off. London rising up and blinking into the February dawn.

“Why haven’t you told me this before?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Never got round to it, I suppose.”

“Will you take me there on Sunday? Can I go inside one of them and have a look?” She turned around in her seat to look at him. Pleadingly, as if she really wanted to go.

He smiled. “Yes, if you like.”

“I’d like it very much.” She smiled back, and her teeth shone white in the darkness against her full lips.

“Anyway, we’d better head back,” he said. He straightened out the boat to head back downstream. Stefanie turned and found her oars, and he dug into the water with both blades, relishing the resistance of the rising water as it fought back the natural river current. He said, “We’re going against the tide, now. If you need a rest, just ship your oars for a bit and I’ll carry on. You’re doing marvelously.”

Stefanie muttered something.

“What’s that?”

She tilted her head over her shoulder. “I said, you’ll pay for this, Hatherfield!”

He laughed aloud. “I expect nothing less!”

The landing was still deserted, a bit crispy with the beginnings of ice. Rowing in February was a dicey affair; Hatherfield was one of the few members who took a boat out at all, and if London experienced a particularly cold snap, with ice actually on the river, he had to content himself with the rowing apparatus indoors. But Hatherfield didn’t mind. He liked the loneliness, the immense physical challenge, the way he departed the landing cold and stiff and returned warm and alive. He maneuvered the boat carefully to shore, keeping her narrow length as steady as he could in the swirling Thames eddies, guided in the blackness by the single gas lamp burning at the door of the boathouse.

“That’s it. Keep your oars up and clear.” He reached down and unlaced his feet from the stirrups. “Now steady on. I’ll get out first and hold her for you.”

From his right came the sound of a heavy steam engine, chugging some unknown ship along the fog-shrouded blackness. In a moment, the wake would hit them. He jumped out and shut his senses to the shock of the cold water. The boat rocked, and Stefanie made an outraged cry.

“Hurry, now! Unlace the stirrups!”

“I can’t! They’ve got wet!”

“I’ll help.” He worked his hand down the wooden edge and plucked at Stefanie’s laces. One foot came free, and the other. His own were turning numb. He found the pair of rubbers he’d stashed in the stern and held them out for her. “Put your feet in these as you come out of the boat,” he said, but just as the words left his mouth, the steamship’s wake hit the shell.

Stefanie, half rising and off balance already, pitched into the water.

“Oh!” she exclaimed wetly.

Hatherfield tossed the boots up the landing, let go of the boat, and grasped Stefanie beneath the shoulders. The water was only a foot or so deep, but she’d managed to fall backward in a thorough splash, smashing the tissue-thin crust of ice on the river’s edge.

An instant later, as the coldness of the water penetrated her wool clothes, her howl of pain splintered the air.

At the sound of that cry, Hatherfield’s body went electric with instinct. He hauled her into his arms and carried her up the landing. He’d left the boathouse key . . . where? In his pocket. He dug frantically into his trousers. She was already shivering violently.
Key!
He shoved it into the lock and threw open the door and bounded to the back of the boathouse and the stairs leading upward to the social rooms.

In the summer, the boathouse employed a full-time caretaker, and his room sat off to the side of the main commons. Hatherfield tried the door, and it slid open, thank God. He dumped Stefanie onto the cot and ripped off her soaking wool jumper, her trousers, her waistcoat.

“Oh my God!” Her lips were blue, her teeth rattling. She gazed up at him, eyes huge and dark and pleading, like an injured fawn. “F-fr-freezing!”

His chest went hollow.

“Here.” The blankets were stacked on the bare mattress. He wrapped two of them around her shivering form. “I’ll be back in a minute!”

“Wh-wh-where the d-devil are you going?”

“To get the bloody boat back!”

FOURTEEN

H
atherfield thundered back down the stairs to the sound of Stefanie’s outraged howl. A loose boat on a dark and frigid river might mean death for some unsuspecting barge or fisherman. How long had he been gone? A minute? Two? Where the devil was the boat?

Upstream, in the rising tide.

He didn’t see the rubber boots on the landing, God help him. He rolled up his trousers to the knee and plunged into the water. A hint of dawn rested on the horizon in a thin line, just gilding the tops of the houses across the river, but not enough to see by. He thrashed upstream through the water, blocking out the cold, his brain filled with the image of huge-eyed Stefanie shivering in her wool blankets.

She’s fine, she’s fine
, he told himself,
just a little cold soaking
, but the fear in his veins knew no logic. The room was unheated. The water had been ice-cold. If he didn’t find that bloody boat in thirty seconds, he would leave it in the water and let the river traffic keep its own damned watch, let the . . .

His knee bumped against something solid.

The boat.

Thank God.

He found the sides, readied his arms, and hauled it up and over his head.

In less than two minutes, he had the boat on its horse and the blades in their stack. The boots could go hang. He ran back upstairs and flung open the door to the caretaker’s room.

“Stefanie!”

She sat huddled in her blankets on the floor before the tiny fireplace, stacking coals. She gazed up at him piteously. “T-tr-trying to s-st-start a fire,” she whispered.

His legs were like icicles; he couldn’t even feel them. He dropped to his knees next to her and took the coal basket. “I’ll do that. Wrap yourself up.”

He stacked the coals and the kindling and struck a match into the pile. A tiny flame leapt up.

“H . . . Hatherfield,” whispered Stefanie. “I . . . I c-can’t s-seem to get warm. Hold me.”

He wrapped his arms around her. “My poor love. It’s all right. Give yourself a moment.”

“Hold me tighter. Tighter, Hatherfield!”

He did. As tightly as he could, willing his warmth into her frozen body. “I’m so sorry, Stefanie. My fault. I should have been more careful.”

“You’re all wet,” she whispered.

“I’m sorry. I had to bring the boat in.”

She snuggled even deeper. “Oh, G-God, I’m so cold! Why can’t I get warm? Help me.
Help
me, Hatherfield.”

“Shh. I’m so sorry.” He rubbed her back, her arms beneath the blanket. She was nuzzling him now, making his head spin, and then the blankets slipped just a little and he became aware of a certain fact. An awful, unavoidable, and most inconvenient fact.

“You’ve taken your clothes off.” A strangled whisper.

She tilted up her face, with that injured-fawn look in her eyes. “They were w-wet.”

Oh, hell.

Do not look down.

She said softly, “Do you mind?”

Did. He. Mind.
He could see them, just below his horizon of sight, in the gap between blanket and skin: two perfect breasts, curved exactly right to fit in a man’s broad palm, the nipples just hidden into the wool.

His throat went paper dry. “You did that on purpose,” he croaked.

She opened up the blanket. Her eyes, if possible, grew larger. “I’m so cold, Hatherfield. Just look at me.”

Don’t look.

He looked.

“Yes,” he croaked again to her nipples, deeply pink and astonishingly erect and altogether too close to his woolen chest. “You are.” And just like that, in the snap of the twig holding the whole structure in place, his self-control crashed and tumbled in a heap, somewhere on the floor between them.

He wanted to tear his eyes away. He really did. But his mind could not quite encompass the reality of Stefanie’s breasts, the perfection even more splendid than his imagination had drawn them, so flushed and round and firm and . . . well, lonely. Needing a hand to hold them.

Without even thinking, Hatherfield lifted his palm and brushed his thumb against the very utmost tip of her rightmost nipple.

“Oh.” She shivered. “I’m warmer already.”

He brushed again. Small and hard as a tiny pebble, soft skinned as velvet.

He bent and licked it. Just the very tip-top, an infinitesimal speck of skin. Surely there was nothing wrong with that.

“Hatherfield.”

He couldn’t stop the thoughts in his brain now. Let the world damn him for them. Stefanie’s white and pink body, soft in his arms, under his fingers, under his lips, touching her, kissing her, thrusting into her. His cock, already rigid, pushed fiercely against the placket of his trousers.

He licked the other nipple. Cool and hard and smooth under his tongue, tasting sweetly of Stefanie.

She made a little sound in her throat and wrapped her arms around the back of his head, cocooning them together in the blanket.

If he kept his clothes on. If only he kept his clothes on, it would be all right, he could stay in control of himself. He could touch her, kiss her, in perfect command. Discover the curves and scents and textures of her body. Warm her chilled body by the most efficient means he knew.

Surely there was nothing wrong with that.