The Savage Miss Saxon (25 page)

Alix bundled her hands into tight fists, torn between a desire to fling something in Mrs. Anselm’s snickering face and an even stronger urge to kick Nicholas—the loudmouthed looby—in the shins. In the end, she said nothing and Mrs. Anselm was left to savor her victory, for just then Cuffy wandered over, eager to try out an idea of his on the ladies.

“I’ve been thinking, you know,” he began before Jeremy, who had followed along as a matter of course, piped up irrepressibly, “There’s a first!”

Turning quelling eyes on his friend, Cuffy cleared his throat and began again. “As I was saying before I was so
rudely
interrupted,” he pursued doggedly, “I was thinking, since we seem to be a sort of house party here anyway, and the holidays are coming on—what do you say to putting on a pantomime or some such thing?”

His idea was met by shouts of “Good show!” from the younger members of the party and a groan of despair from Nicholas—who now gave up the last lingering traces of hope that he would be able to shove the Anselms out before January. The way his luck was running, the countryside would then be hit with the worst blizzard in a decade and the whole bunch of them would be sponging off him until the spring thaw!

Quickly, Nicholas voiced his objections to the idea, saying rather firmly that Mrs. Anselm had told him only that morning at breakfast (after he had confronted her about her activities of the night before) that she and her children would be removing to their own residence within a week.

“That’s time and enough to do something,” Cuffy objected, unaware or uncaring of any underlying tensions. “It wouldn’t have to be anything elaborate—just a single evening with a few skits and some dancing.”

“What exactly did you have in mind?” Alix asked the youth, her agile mind turning over a plan of her own. “Will there be costumes involved—or
masks?
”

It was Jeremy who realized what Alix was thinking. It would be so easy to slip Reginald into Linton Hall in the midst of a party, especially if there were masks involved. Who would notice the eminently unnoticeable Reggie when he entered alongside the county gentry—or when he slipped out again, Helene by his side? It was perfect—so perfect he was sorry he had not thought of it himself. Immediately he began voicing his strong desire to have Linton Hall thrown open for such a party and even began casting the others in the roles they should play in the pantomime.

“Nick, you must be Lord Dashaway, of course,” he bubbled merrily, “and Cuffy is perfect for Lord Flirt Away.”

Cuffy, not one to be left out of anything—and especially not one to be left out of something he had instigated—piped up, “Billy will make a perfect Spantu Long Tong Song, don’t you know, and Rupert could be Lord Dumble Dum Deary to the life!”

“What about me?” Jeremy asked with some trepidation.

“Lord Lollypop,” Billy supplied promptly, earning himself a roar of laughter all round.

“And the ladies?” Nicholas asked, resigning himself to his fate.

“Helene would perhaps like to be Lady Languish,” Jeremy suggested, “but I don’t know about Alix and Mrs. Anselm.”

“How about Mrs. Strut for Mrs. Anselm?” Nick suggested, knowing his sarcasm would flow neatly over that woman’s empty head. “And as for Alix,” he went on with the air of a man who would as lief be hanged for a pig as a shoat, “Alix is Fanny Fandango to the life!”

“Oh, I say, Nick, that’s famous!” Jeremy agreed enthusiastically. “I know we have some old scripts about somewhere. What say we put our heads together? Cuffy, Billy—you too, Rupert—come with me to the library. I’m sure we’ll unearth something useful.”

“Oh, but I had hoped we could dance for a bit this evening,” Helene complained, right after receiving a sound nudge in the ribs from her mama. “Mama plays quite nicely, you know, and has volunteered to provide the music for us.”

Reluctantly Jeremy, remembering his manners, agreed to the scheme and they adjourned to the music room, where Mrs. Anselm took her place at the piano and began beating out a tune. Nicholas, of course, partnered Helene as she was his house guest, and Jeremy led Alix into the lively country dance while Billy, Cuffy, and Rupert propped up the walls with their shoulders.

As an idea for pushing her daughter into Linton’s arms, it was not a resounding success. Even Mrs. Anselm could see how shadowy Helene’s milk-and-water looks appeared next to the flash and verve of Alix’s vibrant coloring and features. While they were still with their original partners, Mrs. Anselm struck up a waltz, determined to take advantage of every opportunity that presented itself.

“I don’t know how to waltz,” Jeremy apologized, his steps coming to a halt after he had trod on Alix’s toes three times in as many moments. “Sorry.”

Seeing another way to slay two birds with one stone, so to speak, the redoubtable (and hopelessly obtuse) Mrs. Anselm trilled, “Oh, my Rupert is at home to a peg on the dance floor. He shall partner you, dear.”

“I should be delighted!” Rupert said, taking his cue.

Suddenly Nicholas had had enough of the whole thing. The dancing was just one more bad idea heaped on top of a huge pile of bad ideas, and the thought of Rupert’s lily-white hands touching his Alix was just too much.

“Delighted my Aunt Alice!” the Earl nearly shouted, so overborne was he. “Do, and I shall likely toss you down the stairs!”

“Nick!” his brother was startled into exclaiming. “I know she’s your betrothed but you’re coming on a bit strong, ain’t you? You can’t fly into a pet just because she dances with someone else.”

“In a love fit,” Billy pointed out with more honesty than tact.

It was left to Cuffy, of all people, to step into the breech, as no one else seemed to be doing anything more constructive than standing about staring at each other, and he did so with his typical blend of sophistication and youthful candor. “No need for anyone to fall into a twitter,” he said calmly, placing himself between Nicholas and the person who seemed most likely to plant the Earl a facer, his fiancée. “May I suggest that Helene and Alix, who I know have been yearning for a few minutes of female talk, retire to the drawing room while Mrs. Anselm and I tidy up in here? Billy, you and Rupert and Jeremy go spy out that script in the library. And Nick—” He turned to face his host, who was just then standing with a look of suppressed fury on his handsome face. “I do believe someone should check on Sir Alexander. It is entirely possible, considering his mood when we left the table, that the poor old fellow has drunk his way into a slight decline.”

As the party seemed universally receptive to having someone telling them just how they should go on—for indeed the atmosphere in the music room was become uncomfortably
warm
and they all would like nothing more than to escape it—everyone readily fell in with Cuffy’s plan and quickly scattered to their assigned areas.

After a few minutes spent helping Mrs. Anselm reassemble her music sheets and convincing the woman she looked rather pulled and should perhaps decide on an early night (with his usual lack of subtlety, Cuffy’s comments on Mrs. Anselm’s appearance had the woman racing to her mirror to inspect herself for indications that the end was near), the aspiring diplomat joined his friends in the library, where they discussed the pantomime and, after Rupert’s departure from the room, Alix’s obvious, to them at least, plans for the elopement to take place that same night.

In the meantime, Alix and Helene shared a settee in the drawing room while the former apprised the latter of much the same thing—holding Helene’s trembling hand and administering a sniff of burnt feathers when the silly chit decided to swoon dead away at the thought of seeing her beloved Reginald once more.

It seemed, to Alix anyway, to have taken an unconscionable amount of time to explain the elopement plan to Helene (once the girl had roused from her swoon), and even now, sitting alone in the drawing room after the fainthearted girl had been safely delivered into the hands of her maid, Alix had more than a few misgivings as to whether or not the chit possessed the backbone to so defy her mama.

Alix rose from her seat and walked to the glass doors overlooking the garden. “How did I ever get caught up in this coil?” she asked herself aloud, before sighing deeply and stepping onto the flagstones outside, hoping the chilly night air would help to clear her mind.

“Come out here to make your own plans for redesigning the grounds, have you,
hmm?
I warn you—I’ll brook no miniature Indian village on the south lawns.”

“Nicholas! You startled me.” Alix peered into the darkness beyond the light cast from the chandelier in the drawing room and the Earl emerged from the shadows, a cheroot stuck in the corner of his mouth.

“Sorry, darling, he apologized insincerely, tossing away the unlit cigar. “I have just spent a very trying half hour helping Poole and two footmen disengage your grandfather from his death grip around my gin decanter. He’s sleeping it off in the study right now, and with any luck we’ll be able to heft him into your carriage for the ride home within the hour.”

Alix hung her head. “I am sorry my behavior at table prompted poor Grandfather to dive into your gin supply. I was mean-spirited enough to try to disconcert that odious Mrs. Anselm and forgot your warnings about Sir Alexander’s antipathy toward foreigners.”

Nicholas smiled warmly, his white teeth flashing in the moonlit night, and suggested that perhaps a certain discomfiture with being faced with his presence for the first time since the “incident” at the stream may also have muddled her thought processes a bit.

“Oh!” Alix sneered scornfully. “I should have known better than to think you wouldn’t comment on that. It seems I have made two errors tonight—trying to get some of my own back on Mrs. Anselm and inadvertently setting up Grandfather’s hackles, and trusting you to act the gentleman when doing so would have set a precedent you could never live up to if you lived a thousand years!”

“Now, now, my savage,” Nicholas interposed hastily before Alix could turn on her heel and run away, “you are being most unfair. An English gentleman, I’ll have you know, considers his reputation as a gentleman to be his most valuable possession. I’ll not let you destroy my good name so easily. To be considered a real English gentleman, you see, means that such a man must not lie, go back on his word, or flinch from the consequences of his actions. Nowhere does this code advise being such a gudgeon as to leave so earthshaking an event as the one shared by us at the stream unmentioned—to do so would soon build a wall between us that might be impossible to tear down. I hereby present the subject, prepared—nay, eager—for the consequences.”

“Piffle!” Alix answered indignantly.

“That’s one way of putting it, I guess,” Mannering acknowledged with a shrug, “but at least having the subject out in the open now, we can perhaps discuss it and clear the air.”

“I’d rather close the subject, thank you anyway, by the simple expediency of
never speaking to you again!
” So saying, she turned sharply as if to leave him, but she had taken no more than two steps before Nicholas took hold of her arm and whirled her back to face him.

“I said we’ll talk about it, dammit,” he growled with some force. “I can’t sleep, I can’t eat—all I can do is think about it—I
have
to talk about it!”

“Force those thoughts from your mind then, my lord,” Alix responded icily. “Find yourself an engrossing hobby, and employ a soothing draught at bedtime.”

Nicholas bit off a pithy laugh. “Ha! Only a heavy red brick applied sharply to the side of my head could ever put me out too deep for dreams—very
disturbing
dreams. No, I feel my only hope for sanity is to exorcise the demons from my brain by living out my fantasy.”

Suddenly Alix found herself clamped tightly in Nicholas’s arms as his lips came down to claim hers in a kiss born of desperation. Neither of them content with namby-pamby shows of affection, the two vitally alive, tinglingly aware forms at once melted together in an explosion of passion that left them both trembling when it was over. Standing closely together, still locked in each other’s arms, Alix murmured shakily against his shoulder, “I do believe you’ve compromised me yet again, my lord.”

Nicholas placed nibbling kisses up and down the smooth column of her throat, pausing only long enough to whisper into her ear, “Compromise no longer has anything to do with it, puss. I love you, you know.”

Alix stiffened in his arms, then relaxed against him. “Truly, Nick?” she asked, her voice wavering just a little bit.

“Truly,” he promised, his tongue making tiny circles behind her ear and devastating inroads on her heightened emotions.

“I—I have found myself growing quite—er—fond of you too,” she confessed, her right hand sliding upward and making tentative contact with the dark hairs that curled slightly at his nape.

“Fond of me, are you?” he teased. “Pray, continue. You edify me extremely.”

Alix should have known he wouldn’t let her off so easily. For some reason, one she could not explain even to herself, she found her inhibitions swept away like cobwebs whenever he held her in his arms. But to voice her feelings—actually put them into words—made her vulnerable to whole worlds of insecurities she had found alien only a short time ago (about the length of time she had known Mannering, as a matter of fact).