The Earl is Mine (8 page)

“I’ve already taken care of Hawthorne. And we can’t turn around.” She folded her arms over her chest. “I’ll only take off my clothes if you’ll let me stay.”

“No.”
He couldn’t help feeling a stirring of lust when she so blithely referenced taking off her clothes.

They stared at each other again, at an impasse.

He leaned forward, his elbows on his thighs. “Listen to me, you stubborn girl,” he whispered fiercely. “You’ll take off your clothes, or I’ll take them off for you.”

Her face blanched, but her chin came up. “I’ll do it myself,” she uttered like the scrapper he knew she was. “And fie on the man who thinks he can take a peek and live to tell the tale.”

The whiskey was having its effect. He wanted to laugh, but he daren’t. He pretended her threat carried weight. She deserved that bit of dignity. After all, they were about to flout society’s rules in the worst possible way.

“Here.” He held up the blanket in front of his face, relieved he could relax his smoldering expression. “Do it now. I can’t see a thing.”

“Hmmm … everything?” From the other side of the woolly barrier, she suddenly sounded more like the old friend she’d always been before that day in the garden. Perhaps she couldn’t maintain the tension, either, when there were practical matters to be sorted out. “My breeches aren’t too bad.”

“They’re soaked straight through,” he said. “Why didn’t you take a greatcoat?”

“I’d little time, and I’d no idea it would rain. It swoops in sometimes, off the sea, without warning. Are you going to ask me if I brought a snuffbox next?”

“No.”

“Well, I did.” She sounded distinctly triumphant. “Quite a masculine one, too, with horses prancing on the front—one has his foot on a serpent.”

“I’ll hold the blanket up all day if I have to until you get dressed, so no more delays. We’ll discuss your escape when you’re dry again.”

“It wasn’t an
escape
,” she insisted, making a few breathy noises. He assumed she was working on removing her coat, which he’d noticed was particularly tight. “I had nothing to fear back home other than the Toad and his wily ways, but I could have taken him on and won. No, what happened this morning merely inspired me to go forward with my plan to go to Paris much sooner than I’d anticipated.”

“Right,” he said dryly. “You’ll tell me the details of this plan. I insist.”

“Perhaps I will—but only when I feel like it. Don’t condescend to me, Gregory. Do you know anything about fate?”

“I know it’s fickle. Like women.” He heard more signs of a struggle. “Trouble with your coat?”

“Yes, blast it. And women are only fickle with you because you’re fickle, too. Haven’t you figured that out yet? There was a cartoon of you in the London papers recently. Did you see it?”

“No. I avoid the gossip rags.”

“Well, you were striding down the gangplank of a ship—shirtless, mildly drunk, a lovesick young lady of the
ton
on either side of you, a lustful look in your eye, a scrap of paper with a draftsman’s sketch of a fragmented heart upon it in your hand, and a banner above your head proclaiming, ‘The Ignoble Architect of Disappointed Hopes Returns.’ The message was clear: Respectable young ladies are not to lose their hearts to you.”

“You’re awfully nosy about my affairs.” He tossed the blanket aside. “Let me.”

She held out an arm. “
Just
the sleeves, my lord. And I’m not nosy. Can I help it that everywhere I turn, there’s a new, scandalous story about you?”

He gave the outstretched cuff a good tug. “So now I’m back to being the rakehell, eh? The one you must warn off.”

“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” she said airily, “as you proved in Eliza’s garden—”

“And you were there, too, kissing me back, right under your friend’s nose.” The sharp, back-and-forth movement of her body toward and away from him as he tugged was doing nothing to help him detach from his recognition that she was all woman beneath her manly garb.

“I might have,” she said, “but I wasn’t myself. I regret that now—a great deal, I assure you.”

“
I
don’t.” He enjoyed hearing her phony gasp. She knew damned well he didn’t regret it. “But I did think the whole deliciously wicked episode behind me.”

“It wasn’t delicious!” she insisted.

“Are you sure about that?” He stared her down a few heated seconds until she looked away. “As I was saying … I thought it was behind me, yet here you are, dressed as a man in my carriage when I’m on my way to a house party to which
you’re
not invited.”

“If I’d known it was you—”

“Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have gotten in. We both know your survival instincts outweigh your pride.”

“Yes, they do—which is why I’d have run in the opposite direction had I known this was the Brady carriage. A haystack would have served me just as well till the storm died down.”

“I’d like to throw you in a haystack right now and leave you there with your beloved field mice. It would serve you right.”

She didn’t seem to hear him. “Damn my fragile sensibilities. They’re to blame. Seeing you made my heart lurch. In terror, of course. And just like in a bad dream, my knees turned to jelly—and I couldn’t run. Or I would have.”

Imp. “Am I like Frankenstein, then?”

“Nearly,” she said with enthusiasm tempered by agitation.

Both were good to see. They meant the blood was flowing down to the tips of her toes. He yanked sharply on her sleeve—which seemed to get tighter and more slippery the more he worked on it—and refused to remark on her answer to the Frankenstein question.

See what she made of that.

“Well, you’re a man without a heart, at the very least,” she said into the silence. Was it guilt making her tone uncertain?

“I am, aren’t I?” He gave a long pull, and the sleeve moved forward a good four inches. “Would that you never forget.” He stopped pulling and did his best to look as if he were the most menacing man on earth, one who’d crush her heart under his feet were she sorry enough to ever fall in love with him again.

It was all true. So it wasn’t difficult.

Her pupils widened, but he went straight back to work on her sleeves, pretending he hadn’t noticed the frisson of worry etched into her brow.

“There,” he said when she was finally free.

“Thank you.” She gave a little shiver. And no wonder. Beneath leather braces holding up her pantaloons, she was sheathed in a voluminous shirt that was also soaked through and clinging to her skin. Underneath that was a swath of white fabric binding her breasts.

Too well,
he couldn’t help thinking in the rakehellish recesses of his brain.

She wrapped her arms around herself. “Please get behind the blanket again.”

“Yes, madam.” He held the makeshift curtain back up. “Let’s finish this off promptly.”

“Uncle Bertie’s trunks are filled with costumes,” she said, and then her voice came to him muffled: “I’ve played with them for years.” Her hands grappled with bunches of the shirt over her head, and then her head must have popped out because her next words were clear. “I’m rather expert,” she added proudly, and dangled the sodden garment over the top edge of the blanket, where it landed on the floor.

As both his hands were occupied, he’d have to wait to shove the blasted thing under the seat. No use opening the door to wring it out, either—the sheets of rain came steadily on.

“Unwind the band of cloth,” he said. “We’ll need to dry it out.”

She paused. “I shouldn’t.”

“You’ll be wearing a shirt and a coat, remember.”

“True,” she said hopefully. “And it’s not as if I’m…” She trailed off.

“Go on and take it off,” he said, ignoring her implication. She might not be bursting out of her bodice as so many fashionable women were, but she was proportioned like a Greek goddess and exceedingly tempting, exactly the way she was. In fact, her modest gowns drove him mad with wanting to see more, to feel more, as he’d done once before—but only barely before the kiss had abruptly ended. “You’re uncomfortable, surely.”

“I am.” She blew out a sigh and began the process of rendering her upper half naked.

The sound of the cloth unwrapping was subtle but audible, and Gregory felt an overwhelming urge to sneak a peek. Just one little glance over the edge. If she were looking down, she wouldn’t even notice, would she?

But of course, he wouldn’t succumb to temptation.
You’re a gentleman,
his conscience chided him.

He hated his bloody conscience.

A few tortured seconds later, Pippa held a straggly bundle of cloth stripping over the blanket.

“Drop it,” he said.

It landed on his boot with a squishy sound.

“I need a new dry shirt.” Panic laced her words. “And coat. Please hurry.”

Oh, how a man’s mind could turn to mush in the presence of a near naked woman! But she was a naked,
cold
woman, and he had an obligation to help her. “You’ll need to hold this side of the blanket then.” He jiggled the left corner.

When she took it, he reached behind him and passed the dry shirt to her free hand over the barrier. They switched ownership of the blanket corner, and seconds later, she’d donned the new shirt.

The same maneuver took place with the coat. It was a bloody circus act they had going. He was the lion—she was the vulnerable maiden.

“Better?” he asked after a moment of hearing her struggle—the blanket was rippling with her efforts.

“Better.” Finally, she pushed the woolen barrier down.

Anxiety hovered about her eyes and mouth, but in her dry jacket and shirt, she already looked vastly improved: alert, robust, even alluring—as if she’d taken a cold shower under a waterfall and had been rubbed down with a towel and put before a fire. It was entirely charming of her to appear so well, considering she was in a damp carriage and still wearing drenched pantaloons.

“It feels good to have the top half of me warm again,” she said, but her teeth knocked against her words, like tiny hammers.

He hid his concern with a steady gaze. “Let’s get the bottom half the same way. I’m going to remove your boots.”

“I can do it myself.”

“Allow me,” he said. “While I remove them, why don’t you wrap up in the blanket?”

“All right,” she said, sounding a bit nervous.

He lifted one slender calf—he refused to think of it as sweet—and the boot came off with a tremendous sucking sound, followed by a long trickle of water.

“It’s like the Flood in here,” she muttered.

When their eyes met, he was glad to see a small twinkle in hers. It sent warmth rushing to the vicinity of his heart—a very unwelcome rush.

“The other,” he reminded her as if she were a wayward soldier, and her expression dimmed.

Good.
They didn’t need to be friendly. Not when he was in possession of her leg. If he followed its trail, it would lead him to a forbidden place he had no business thinking of at all. In fact, he was so thoroughly disgusted with himself, when he lifted her calf, he was a little too quick and her toes snagged the underside of his thigh.

“Sorry,” she whispered.

He sent her a silent glance replete with disapproval and tried to be satisfied that no water came out of the second boot.

“I’ll do the rest,” she offered.

“Let me get your stockings,” he said. “Sit back”—
far
, far
back
—“and stay warm.”

She didn’t question him this time, and her cheeks flushed when he began the task of peeling her sopping wet hose off. He had to work very hard not to attribute any suggestion of intimacy to the action. Her ankle was splendid, her flesh a healthy pale pink, but her feet when they appeared were faintly blue.

He rubbed them hard with his hands, and she giggled outright.

He paused. “Ticklish?”

She put the tip of a thumbnail up to her mouth. “Yes.”

Her toes still weren’t the color they should be, so he lifted both her feet and laid them flat against his shirt, then wrapped his coat around them.

“You can’t do that!” she squeaked.

He shrugged a shoulder. “Just warming them up.” He looked at the roof of the carriage. Gave a little whistle, then gazed out a window for some thirty seconds.

“This must be uncomfortable for you,” she said, still sounding anxious.

“Yes, it’s like having two blocks of ice against my chest, but they’re warming up, little by little, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “But really, you shouldn’t. You really,
really
shouldn’t.”

With every passing second, the encounter was getting cozier and cozier, especially when she burrowed her toes deeper into the linen fabric, inadvertently massaging his nipples. The minx. She had no idea how those two blocks of ice were turning into instruments of torture of a different kind.

“I’ll endure,” he said, his eyes on a lonely outcrop of rocks on a distant portion of the moor.

“I should be sorry for you, I know, but this is
heaven,
” she exclaimed. “Much better than a warm brick.”

He turned to see that she wore a blissful look on her face. If she thought this was heaven, she knew little of men and women and the things that happened between them.

Low on her seat, utterly relaxed, her wet hair curling about her face, she might have spoken with all the pure sincerity of an angel, but she was beginning to look too much like a hoyden for her own good.

“Right, then. They’re warm now.” He opened his coat for entirely selfish reasons. He had to get rid of her—the sooner, the better. Lady Pippa Harrington was far more dangerous than he was, if only she knew.

As if to prove his point, she removed her feet from his chest only with a great deal of reluctance and a long, feminine sigh.

“And now”—he reached beneath the seat again and took a long swig of Father’s whiskey to numb the fire building in his groin—“you’ll change out of your pantaloons.”

Chapter Five

“No,” Pippa told Gregory firmly. She drew the line at pantaloons.

“You must.”

He’d never looked quite like this before. Was he feverish? In pain? Surely he wasn’t sleepy. He looked as though someone had given him a witch’s potion that was either going to make him very sleepy or very
naughty
.