Slightly Sinful (26 page)

"I have overtired you, Uncle Richard," she said. "May I send your valet to you?"

She hurried from the room without waiting for his answer, but his valet was pacing outside the door and so she did not have to go in search of him.

What a strange morning it had been, she thought as she went downstairs. It had seemed longer than a normal day-or even a week. She felt emotionally drained. There had been so little passion in her life before now, either positive or negative. Now there was a superabundance of it.

T HE COOK AND THE HOUSEKEEPER FOUGHT BACK BY taking their case in person to Baron Weston. The housekeeper played her trump card immediately. If his lordship could not trust her to hire the best possible employees for each position in the house, she declared, then she would resign on the spot. But she would not tolerate ladies she did not know from Adam-or Eve-invading her kitchen and upsetting her cook to such a degree that the poor woman doubted she would be able to produce a decent meal as long as Mrs. Leavey remained at Chesbury.

Baron Weston dismissed the cook and accepted the housekeeper's resignation.

"I did not fully realize," he said in the drawing room during the evening, following dinner, "just how unappetizing our meals had become here. I thank you, ma'am. Carlton House cannot have served more delicious fare than you served here tonight. I thought I was off my food, but I have eaten heartily enough this evening."

Phyllis blushed.

"And the cakes at tea this afternoon were as light as air," he said. "All my neighbors will be trying to steal away my cook." He chuckled and suddenly looked better than he had in a day and a half, Alleyne thought.

Mr. and Mrs. Rothe had called during the afternoon with their son and two daughters and had taken tea. So had Mrs. Johnson, her sister, Miss Twigge, and the Reverend and Mrs. Crowell. They had all expressed great delight at making the acquaintance of the baron's niece and her new husband. All had seemed enchanted by Flossie and Phyllis, who had given herself an hour off from her duties in the kitchen. Mrs. Crowell had enjoyed a comfortable coze with Bridget. They had talked about flowers and vegetables and hedgerows and other related topics, from what Alleyne had overheard of their conversation.

"But I cannot, of course, expect you to continue working in my kitchens, ma'am," the baron said with a sigh. "I will have to see what my steward can suggest tomorrow."

"But nothing would give me greater pleasure, my lord," Phyllis assured him. "I like to keep busy-as Colonel Leavey would explain to you if he were here. Cooking is my great love, as embroidery or painting is to other ladies."

"With your permission, my lord," Flossie said, "I will step down to the housekeeper's room in the morning and look over the accounts and organize the household duties of the servants for the day. It will be no trouble at all. Although Colonel Streat employed a full complement of servants whenever we were at home, I always insisted upon keeping a close eye on them myself."

"That is a remarkably kind offer, ma'am," Lord Weston said, looking understandably taken aback. "I am overwhelmed."

While he was speaking, Bridget was fetching a cushion to set behind his head and a stool for his feet. She had already told him, while they still dined, that she would mix a special tea for him at bedtime that was good for the heart.

It amazed Alleyne that they had not all been sent packing long ago for stirring up so many proverbial sleeping dogs so soon after their arrival. But the meals had certainly improved immeasurably. And the stables, Strickland had reported while dressing him for dinner, had had at least a month's worth of muck raked out of them while the head groom busied himself giving orders and seeing that they were carried out.

"I told him," the sergeant had explained, "that he might be depressed on account of the baron has let most of his hunters go and don't ride no more and don't even take the carriage out most days. But that is no excuse for losing his pride in a job well done or for not doing his duty for which he gets paid and housed and fed. I told him that if he was a soldier he would be expected to keep his gun cleaned and loaded and his gear in order and his stomach free of too much rum even when he wasn't in the thick of a war on account of one never knows when our nobs are going to pick a quarrel with the nobs from another country and the guns will be firing again."

But they had not been sent packing. Indeed, Weston seemed to be almost enjoying their company. He did watch Rachel much of the time, though, a somewhat brooding expression on his face. Yet Rachel was the only one among them who made little or no attempt to beguile the baron-or to act the part of happy new wife that she had come here to act.

She was still out of charity with him, of course, Alleyne realized.

They all went to bed early, as they had done the night before. Bridget commented-out of earshot of Weston-that early nights were a luxury of which she would never tire, and Phyllis heartily agreed, especially as she would need to be up early in order to prepare breakfast.

Alleyne was not so sure that these country hours suited him. He was restless. He did think of going back downstairs and outside to take a walk, but clouds must have moved over sometime during the evening, he saw from the window of his bedchamber. It was black out there, and he did not know the park well enough to venture out without some light overhead. Besides, if Weston heard him, he would wonder why his niece's husband had abandoned her bed when their marriage was still in the honeymoon stage.

Alleyne allowed Strickland to help him off with his tight-fitting evening coat and to chatter for a few minutes, but he dismissed him before undressing entirely. He was aware of silence as he stood at the window. Geraldine must have left too-he had heard her talking and laughing with Rachel a short while ago.

He walked into his dressing room. There was no light in hers, but from beyond it he could see the faint shifting glow of a candle. She was still up, then. He hesitated for some time. One of their bedchambers late at night was probably not the wisest setting for a tête-à-tête, but at least they could be assured of some privacy.

"I am coming through," he said aloud. "If you have modesty to preserve, do it now."

She was at her window, as he had been at his a minute or two ago, dressed in a plain, serviceable cotton nightgown in which, of course, she looked quite as alluring as any other woman might look in sheer lace. Geraldine had brushed her hair to a smooth gloss. It hung loose halfway down her back. Her feet were bare. There was a look of surprise and dawning outrage on her face. She was hugging her bare arms with her hands.

"Don't worry," he told her. "I have not come to assert my conjugal rights."

"Why have you come?" she asked him, her eyes taking in his shirt and breeches and stockinged feet-he had come without his cane. "You have no business being in here. Go away."

"We are supposed to be bride and groom, Rache," he said. "Ours is supposed to be a love match. We are supposed to be glowing with the newfound dimension of our love that nightly beddings have brought to us. Instead we are silent and tight-lipped with each other and barely civil. Is this the way to convince your uncle that ours is a match made in heaven?"

She turned away and looked out into blackness again while he propped one shoulder against the empty door frame between her dressing room and bedchamber.

"The one thing we forgot when we agreed to this," she said, "was that we were going to have to do it together. You are a far better actor than I am."

"Do you hold me in such aversion, then?" He sighed and looked at her in some exasperation. "There was a time not so long ago when the mere sight of you coming into my room brightened my days. I was besotted with you from the moment my eyes first alit on you. Did you know that? And there was a time when you chose my company, coming to sit with me and talk with me and read to me when there was no medical necessity for you to be there. Is it possible for us to forget what happened to change all that?"

"No," she said after a lengthy silence. "It is not possible. Things like that cannot be put from mind by a simple act of will. I was gauche and totally unskilled and gave you a disgust of me."

"Deuce take it, Rachel," he said, exasperated anew, "do you think I care about gaucherie and inexperience? It is the fact that you did not warn me that I resented. But that is all in the past. It is time we put it behind us."

"It is impossible to forget it," she said. "It is foolish even to suggest that we try."

"Good Lord, Rachel," he said, "it is just a bedding we are talking about. It was not an earth-shattering experience, perhaps, for a few different reasons, but it was not all bad either. It was just sex."

"Exactly," she said.

Women, of course, were very different from men in their attitudes to such matters. He knew that, though he did not know how he knew. It had been a foolish thing to say. The fact that it had been sex was the worst thing about it as far as she was concerned. For her, he knew, it had been earth-shattering, though not in a pleasant way.

Deuce take it, he could be hobbling about the streets of Brussels or London now, uncovering relatives and friends beneath every stone. What on earth had put this madcap idea into his head? But he knew what. Rachel had wanted to help her friends, and he had wanted to help Rachel because he owed her his life and perhaps because he had still been just a little besotted with her.

"Well," he said, "you are going to have to try to do a better acting job tomorrow, Rache. You are going to have to pretend you are in love with me and let it show through every pore in your body. Otherwise we will have come here in vain and will be leaving here in one month's time no better off than we are now."

She turned to look at him.

"My uncle has a bad heart," she said. "He could die at any moment. He says he is glad I have come, and he wants us to stay so that he can get to know both of us-even though he observed our quarrel through his window this morning. He says that there has been an emptiness in his life since my mother eloped with my father. He is determined to give a ball in our honor. But he might have done all this years ago. He might have had me here visiting frequently for the past sixteen years. He might have forgiven Mama before that and had her visit here with me. And now he is dying."

She covered her mouth with her hand, but he could see that behind it she was biting her upper lip to control her emotions.

"Perhaps, Rachel," he said, "it is time you simply forgave him."

"How can I?" she asked him. "How can I? My life has been empty too. Sometimes I used to think that I was more like a mother than a daughter to my father. Taking care of him was too great a burden."

He stared broodingly at her. What heavy baggage people carried with them from their past. Was it one advantage of losing one's memory completely? What sort of unfinished business had he been hauling about with him before he fell and hit his head?

"I hate this," she said suddenly, walking abruptly to the bed and folding back the bedcovers. "I hate this self-pity and this doom and gloom. This is not what I am like. This is not me. I never used to go about proclaiming that my life was burdensome and empty. I just lived it. Why should it appear to me now that it was both?"

"Perhaps because you have come here and opened the book of your past," he said. "And perhaps the strength of your negative emotions is a result of coming here in the wrong way-for which I am entirely to blame."

"Don't start offering again to confess the truth to Uncle Richard." She sat on the bed, her hands grasping the mattress beside her, apparently quite oblivious to the message she might be thought to be sending. "It is too late for that."

"I wonder if you realize," he said, "that even if you do gain possession of your fortune, these four ladies will refuse to take a penny of it in compensation for what they lost to Crawley."

"Of course they won't." Her eyes widened. "It was my fault. And their dream is all they have to sustain them."

"I doubt it," he said. "They are tough women, Rachel. They have survived some of life's hardest buffetings, and they will continue to survive in their own way. They are not your responsibility-or mine. They would not wish to be."

"I will find a way of persuading them," she said. "I must. But first I have to persuade Uncle Richard. He said this morning that he will be in no hurry to give me the jewels. You are able to support me, he said, and so I do not really need them. It is so unfair. I ought not to have to beg and plead. If he cares for me, he ought to give me freely what is mine."

What she needed more than anything in her life, he thought suddenly, was some laughter. There seemed to have been precious little of it through her life. And yet she had been completely transformed by it this morning when she had scrambled about on the horse's back, getting her legs hopelessly tangled in her skirts and revealing shocking lengths of leg.

He had got her into this mess, and it was now up to him to get her out again. But at the same time perhaps he could think of ways to make her laugh again-and again.

It was something he could do for her.

"Tomorrow, Rachel," he said, "we are going to have to act as if we had spent all night on that bed making love. We are going to have to commit ourselves-both of us-to this charade, since you will not permit me to end it. Smile at me."