Last Night's Scandal (10 page)

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Thanks to a gawking onlooker getting in the way, Lisle hadn’t time to tackle the drunkard before the man went for her. Olivia hit him with a coffeepot, and he went down. A servant carrying a tray tripped over him and knocked over a guest in the process. Some people ran to the doors, and a few climbed onto chairs and tables, but the majority crowded close to the center of the fray.

While Lisle was clearing a path to Olivia, he caught sight of Bailey. Unlike everyone else, the maid kept her head, calmly gathering the two old ladies and shooing them toward the courtyard.

Olivia’s voice called his attention back.

“You are a disgrace to your entire benighted sex,” he heard her say in the icy tones she must have learned from Rathbourne.

The dazed drunkard lay where he’d fallen, blinking up at her.

Now was the time for her to make herself scarce.

But no.

“A gentleman takes his lumps and learns from them,” she raged on. “But you—picking on
women
. You ought to be ashamed, you great, drunken bully. It’s a pity there’s no one about man enough to give you a proper thrashing.”

“You tell ’im, miss!” someone shouted from the safety of the back of the room.

“Always throwin’ his weight around.”

“No one touches him ’cuz he’s squire’s son.”

They were eager for a brawl. Normally, Lisle would enjoy joining in. He’d take great pleasure in giving this jackass a thrashing he wouldn’t forget.

But brawls were unpredictable things, and Olivia in one of her temper fits was unpredictable, too. He couldn’t trust her not to get killed.

He tapped her on the shoulder. She threw an impatient glance back at him—a furious flash of blue—before reverting to her tirade.

Lisle couldn’t be sure—given the state she was in—that she’d even recognized him. And given the state she was in, there was only one thing to do.

He came up close behind her, looped his arm over her right shoulder and across and down under her left arm, thrust his hip into the small of her back to take her off balance, and dragged her away. She struggled, but the awkward angle of her body left her no leverage at all. She could only stumble back whither he towed her, cursing him all the while.

“I’m not done with him, devil take you! I’m not going! Let me go!”

“Stifle it,” he said. “We have to get out of here before the village constable comes and people find out who you are and you end up in the newspapers again.”

“Lisle?”

“Who else?”

An instant’s silence, then, “No!” she shrieked. “Take your hands off me! I’m not done with him, the great, drunken thickhead!” She tried to kick backward, but he kept his legs out of danger as he pulled her over the cobblestones toward the coach.

“If you don’t settle down, I vow, I’ll knock you unconscious, tie and gag you, and take you straight to Derbyshire,” he said.

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“Oooh, you’re so big and strong. I’m so afraid.”

“Or maybe I’ll leave you trussed by the side of the road.” The innkeeper, who’d followed them out, ran ahead to open the coach door before the footman could do it. Lisle pushed her up the step. She stumbled into the vehicle, and her maid caught her. He slammed the door shut.

“Away,” he told the coachman. “I’ll be right behind you.” He watched the carriage rattle out of the courtyard.

“Thank ’ee, sir,” said the innkeeper. “Best to have the ladies out of the way in a case like this. Out of sight, out of mind, I always say.”

Lisle thrust a bag of coins into his hand. “Sorry about the mess,” he said.

He quickly found his horse and Nichols. A few minutes later, he was upon the Old North Road once again.

She was going to kill him.

Unless he killed her first.

Ware, Hertfordshire

Twenty-one miles from London

Declaring themselves famished, the ladies Cooper and Withcote disembarked and hurried into the Saracen’s Head for breakfast.

Olivia sent Bailey in with them, but remained in the carriage, trying to collect herself. She needed a cool head to think, to deal with Lisle.

Between the exhaustion and the annoyance of realizing she’d miscalculated, cool thinking was difficult. It hadn’t helped to hear the two ladies, dear as they were, prattling on.

They’d seen Lisle throw somebody out of his way, and that was the most thrilling thing they’d seen in years. They wouldn’t stop talking about it and speculating in their usual bawdy way about his muscles and stamina and such.

Their comments brought back the warm pressure of his powerful arm across her body.

She could practically
feel
it still, as though he’d left an imprint, curse him.

Never mind. He was a man being excessively manly, and it was thrilling, but she’d recover.

And being Lisle, naturally, he had to be aggravating and turn up more quickly than she’d expected.

She’d known he’d follow. He saw himself as her big brother, and he was protective by nature. Furthermore, like every other male, he believed he was infinitely more rational and capable than any woman. No man could trust a woman to take charge of anything except a household and children—and among the upper orders, women were barely trusted with those departments.

Even her mother, who was not at all blind to her faults, would know Olivia was more than qualified to undertake both a long journey and the restoration of a property. Not that she’d intended to do it alone—but she
could
.

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Well, then, all was going according to plan, except for the unforeseen to-do at the Falcon Inn. Which she’d quite enjoyed. The look on the bully’s face when she’d slapped him with her glove was priceless.

But then Lisle had come and dragged her away and—

The carriage door opened.

There he stood, looking up at her, a rainbow of colors ringing one silver-grey eye.

“You’d better come in and eat breakfast now,” he said. “We won’t stop to eat again until midday.”

“
We
?” she said. “You weren’t coming. You would rather live like a pauper in Egypt or die of starvation than yield to your parents. You have decided that journeying to Scotland is a fate worse than death.”

“Traveling with you, it’s going to be even more fateful, I daresay,” he said. “Do you want to eat or not? It’ll be hours before you get another chance.”

“You are not in charge of this journey,” she said.

“Now I am,” he said. “You were determined to make me do this. Now you’ll have to do it my way. Eat or starve, it’s your choice. I’m going to look at the famous bed.” Leaving the carriage door open, he turned away and sauntered back into the inn.

O
livia burst into the bedchamber ten minutes later.

“You,” she began. But even in one of her blind rages, she could hardly miss the bed, and it stopped her dead. “Good grief!” she said. “It’s enormous.” Lisle casually looked up from his examination of one of the bedposts at the head.

Her bonnet was askew and her hair was coming loose, red curls tumbling against her pearly skin. Her clothes were rumpled from traveling. Anger still sparked in the impossibly blue eyes, though they’d widened at the sight of the bed that had been famous in Shakespeare’s time.

She looked wild, and though he ought to be used to that shatteringly beautiful face by now, the wildness threw him off balance again, and his heartbeat was sharp and painful.

“That’s why it’s called the Great Bed of Ware,” he said calmly. “You’ve never seen it before?”

She shook her head, and the curls danced madly.

“Quite old—by English standards, at any rate,” he said. “Shakespeare refers to it in
Twelfth Night
.”

“I’ve seen this style of thing,” she said. “Tons of oak, carved within an inch of its life. But nothing nearly as large.”

It was, indeed, carved with dizzying exuberance. Flowers and fruits and animals and people and mythological beings covered every inch of the black oak.

“Twelve feet square and nine feet tall,” he said. Facts were always safe and soothing. “It’s a room, really, enclosed by curtains. Look at the panels.” She stepped nearer.

He caught her scent and remembered the feel of her body under his hands, when he’d pulled her out of the inn.

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Facts.
He focused on the physical features of the bed. Inside carved arches, two panels portrayed scenes of the town, including its famous swans. He lightly ran his index finger over their inlaid wood.

It lacked the grace of Egyptian art. To his surprise, though, he found it enchanting.

“They’re like windows, you see,” he said. “It was meant to entertain. It must have been even more eye-catching when it was new. Here and there you can see bits of paint. In its early days, it would have been quite colorful—like the temples and tombs of Egypt. And the same as in Egypt, visitors have left their marks.” He traced a set of initials. “Seals, too.” He let his gaze return to her face. Wonder filled it now. The rage was gone, the storm blown over, because she was enchanted as well. She was sophisticated and cunning and had never been naïve. Yet her imagination was boundless, and she could be captivated, like a child.

“How odd that you’ve never seen it before,” he said.

She examined a lion’s head with a red seal on its nose. “Not at all odd,” she said. “Since we’re usually traveling to Derbyshire or Cheshire, we don’t take this road. And when I leave London, it’s because I’m in disgrace, which means getting me out and far away as quickly as possible. No time for sightseeing.”

He looked away from her face. Too much of that and he’d grow addlepated. He studied one of the satyrs adorning a bedpost. “Slapping that drunkard with your glove and calling him a coward wasn’t the cleverest thing you’ve ever done.”

“But it was immensely satisfying.”

“You lost your temper,” he said. When she lost her temper, he couldn’t trust her brain or her instincts. He couldn’t trust her to take care of herself.

He came away from the bedpost and folded his hands behind his back. ”What did your mother tell you about losing your temper?” he said, in the same patient tone he’d heard her mother employ on the day he’d met Olivia.

She narrowed her eyes at him. “I must count to twenty.”

“I think you didn’t count to twenty,” he said.

“I wasn’t in the mood,” she said.

“I’m amazed you didn’t treat him to one of your apologies.” Putting a hand to his heart, he said in falsetto, “ ‘Oh, sir, I do most humbly and abjectly beg your pardon.’ Then you could flutter your eyelashes at him, and fall to your knees.” She’d done this the first time they’d met, and the performance had left him dumbstruck.

“By the time you were done,” he went on, “everyone would be weeping—or reeling.

Including him. And you could slip out quietly.”

“I’m sorry now I didn’t,” she said. “It would have prevented my being manhandled out of the inn.”

It would have prevented his feeling her supple body under his arm.

“I don’t see why you didn’t drag
him
out—to the courtyard—and put his head under the pump,” she said. “That’s what someone ought to have done when the trouble started. But everyone was afraid of him. Not you, I’d think—but you had to get all manly and overbearing with
me
.”

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“It was more fun dragging you out,” he said.

She drew nearer and examined his eye.

Her scent swarmed about him and his heart was racing.

“That Belder,” she said, shaking her head. “Why didn’t he hit you
harder
?” She swept out of the room.

T
he day was cool and grey, and the rain had laid the dust. The ladies wanted fresh air, they said. Riding in a gloomy, stuffy carriage wasn’t their idea of agreeable travel.

Olivia suspected that the reason they wanted the louvered window panels open was to admire the masculine scenery nearby.

It was fine scenery, and she couldn’t help enjoying it, too, though Lisle had turned out to be a Tragic Disappointment.

He rode alongside, practically at her shoulder, keeping pace with the carriage, instead of riding on ahead as she’d expected him to do. Their carriage’s speed, in consideration of the ladies’ old bones, was slower than Lisle could like. It was slower than Olivia liked, certainly. She wished she were riding as well, but she hadn’t thought she would, and hadn’t arranged for it.

Her saddle was packed away in one of the carriages with their other belongings, and packed deep. She hadn’t believed she’d need it until they reached their destination. While one could hire horses at the posting inns, and she could ride virtually any sort of horse without difficulty, a saddle was an altogether different article. A lady’s saddle was as personal an item as her corset, and made to fit her precisely.

Not that she needed a saddle. She was Jack Wingate’s daughter, after all, and as easy on a horse’s back as any gypsy.

But no one was to know she still did that sort of thing. No one was to know about the men’

s clothes that Bailey had adapted to fit her, which lay neatly folded in a box among her other belongings.

She recalled how shocked Lisle had been the first time he’d seen her in boy’s clothes.

She was remembering that moment—How could she forget the comical look on his face?—