'Twas the Night After Christmas (9 page)

She had a hard time not noticing the impressive chest well-displayed by his thin lawn shirt. And the broad shoulders. Not to mention the muscular forearms laid bare, since his shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbows.

Oh, how could she pay attention to such things? Why did she care that his shirt was open at the throat? Why couldn’t she tear her gaze from the patch of skin so tantalizingly revealed?

Because it had been a long time since she’d spent time with a man so informally dressed. That’s all.

With some effort, she forced her gaze up to his face. He held a glass of brandy, which he sipped from before stepping back just enough to let her enter. “I began to wonder if you forgot our bargain,” he groused.

She slid past him, acutely aware of how his eyes followed her and how his body loomed over hers. He smelled of spirits and smoke. She wasn’t used to that, for Kenneth had neither smoked nor drank strong liquor. It should have repulsed her.

But it was so . . . indescribably male. And for a woman who’d spent most of her time in the last few months with an older woman, a young maid, and a small child, it was a rather refreshing change. A little
too
refreshing for her sanity.

She moved to put some distance between them. “Perhaps
you
forgot I have other duties in the evening. Surely you didn’t want me to tell your mother that I had to leave her in order to come to your bedchamber.”

“Of course not.” He strode over to stoke the fire. “She keeps you up this late every night?”

“It’s barely ten o’clock. We often stay up later than this. And I enjoy keeping your mother company, no matter how late.” She cast him an arch glance, determined to provoke him into revealing more about his estrangement from the countess. “Just because you find your mother irksome doesn’t mean that
I
do.”

“It’s not that I find Mother irksome,” he snapped. “It’s—” He caught himself. “Never mind. It’s of no matter.”

Stifling a sigh, she tried another tack. “At dinner, I couldn’t help but notice that she confounded your expectations about her need for money.”

“No doubt you warned her of my suspicions.”

“As a matter of fact, I did not,” she said stiffly. “Though I do think you ought to give her the chance to—”

“Let us be clear on one thing.” He bore down on her with a fierce scowl. “Talking about my mother is not entertaining. So if you intend to spend the evening trying to soften me toward her, you’d better readjust your plans. I will not discuss her with you.”

“But—”

“Not one word. Not if you want to keep working here. Understood?”

She huffed out a frustrated breath. The man was maddening! How was she supposed to find out anything when he and his mother were so bent on being stubborn? Clearly, she would have to be more subtle.

When she didn’t answer, he glowered at her. “Do we understand each other, Mrs. Stuart?”

“I’m not hard of hearing,” she grumbled. “Nor am I lacking in comprehension.”

His glower faded, and he cast her a thin smile. “We’ll see about that.”

“I’m sure we will, my lord.”

“No need to be so formal when we’re alone,” he drawled, dropping into one of two well-upholstered chairs by the fire and taking another sip of his brandy. “You could call me Devonmont, as my friends do. Or ‘darling.’ ”

She rolled her eyes. “We’ve already settled that we’re not to have that sort of . . . friendship, sir.”

“Yes.” He let his gaze trail down her with an exaggerated heat clearly meant to provoke. “What a pity.”

“Tell me, do women generally respond to your transparent attempts to get beneath their skirts?”

“Probably about as often as gentlemen flee your transparent attempts to reform them.”

A smile tugged at her lips. She’d never tried reforming an employer before. Something in him must bring out the devil in her. “
You
don’t flee.”

“No need—I’m not the reforming type, so you don’t frighten me.” He lifted his glass in a pantomime of a toast. “And
you
aren’t responding to my attempts to get beneath your skirts. So that makes us even.”

Only because he wasn’t
seriously
trying to get beneath her skirts. And thank heaven, too. If he ever did, she might have trouble resisting him.

She glanced about the room, which had been closed up until today. As with many such rooms in country houses, “Red Room” was a misnomer—there wasn’t anything red in it. Probably it had been red a hundred years ago, and the name had stuck long after it was refurbished. Now the curtains and linens were an azure print, and the walls were painted a similar blue.

It was furnished with an imposing canopy bed and the two armchairs by the fire, separated by a little table. The only other piece of furniture was a bookcase of walnut that sat against the wall, next to a surprisingly large window that looked out over the lawn.

“Was this your room when you lived here?” If so, he’d left it utterly barren of anything that might have been his as a schoolboy—no
globes or telescopes or even old racing journals. Only a few books were there, which was odd, given his rumored obsession with increasing Montcliff Manor’s library.

“No,” he said tersely. “The nursery was my room.”

“Well, of course, until you were older, but after you went off to school, you must have had—”

“I’ve decided what entertainment I wish for tonight,” he said bluntly.

Shrugging off his lack of interest in discussing his room, she walked toward him. “All right. And what might that be?”

With a sudden, suspect gleam in his eye, he reached for a book on the table next to him. “Since Mother said you were an excellent reader, I thought you might read aloud to me.”

His manner reminded her of Jasper when he thought to play some trick on her.

Warily, she sat down in the chair opposite him and took the volume he offered. Then she pushed up her spectacles so she could better view the cover.
Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
.

A woman of pleasure? Oh, dear.

She felt the earl’s gaze on her, felt him waiting for her to make some expression of horrified dismay. The desire to thwart his expectation was too overwhelming to resist.

Opening the book, she read the title aloud in a resounding voice that surprised her almost as much as it seemed to surprise him. Then she turned the page and began to read the text:

Madam,

I sit down to give you an undeniable proof of my
considering your desires as indispensable orders. Ungracious then as the task may be, I shall recall to view those scandalous stages of my life—

“You’re actually going to read it,” he interrupted.

Biting back a smile, she lifted her gaze. “That
is
what you asked of me, isn’t it?”

His gaze hardened. “Of course. Do go on.”

So she did. It was the account of a country girl who set off to make her fortune in the city, only to be taken in by a suspiciously friendly older woman. Camilla instantly recognized the older character as a bawd in disguise. Not for nothing had she helped her vicar husband with his work in Spitalfields. She knew how easily naive girls were deceived.

But the narrator, relating the beginnings of her own downfall, didn’t seem overly bothered by it. Indeed, she had no sense of shame at all.

Camilla found that fascinating. She was becoming quite intrigued by the book when his lordship said, “You can stop now if you wish.”

She glanced up to find him looking nervous. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve only read ten pages.”

“But I doubt you’ll like where it goes from here.”

He seemed so uncomfortable with the idea of her going on that she couldn’t resist provoking him. “Nonsense. This happens to be a book I read often,” she lied blithely. “I’m enjoying revisiting it.”

Perhaps she had done it up a bit too brown, for he eyed her
with rank skepticism. “Are you indeed?” He leaned back in his chair. “What’s your favorite part?”

She gauged the length of the book and took a guess. “Page ninety-six.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “Then by all means, do read that aloud.”

“All right.” So far there hadn’t been anything terribly shocking, so she thumbed through to it without a qualm.

But page 96 did not contain text. Instead, there was only a crudely drawn illustration so appalling it took her breath away.

A woman lay on a bed, naked from the waist down, with her legs parted as she prepared to receive a man whose overly large appendage, also quite naked and rendered in some detail, jutted out from his breeches. The female actually had her hand on it, as if to . . . to assess its dimensions.

Nothing in Camilla’s experience had prepared her for such a blatant display of carnality.

“Well, read on,” the earl taunted when she hesitated.

A blush rose on her cheeks. “I can’t.” She lifted her stunned gaze to his. “There are no words. Just a . . . picture.”

The color drained from his face. Reaching over, he snatched the book from her and stared at it, then shot her a horrified look. “Oh, holy hell. It has pictures.”

I
f Camilla hadn’t been so mortified, she would have laughed. “Surely you knew that.”

“Not exactly.” When she eyed him skeptically, he shut the book and set it down. “I recently acquired this edition as part of a lot of fifty books I won at auction. I hadn’t looked at it since I bought it. My other edition, in London, is not . . . er . . . illustrated.”

“You have
two
editions of that?”

His eyes narrowed. “You shouldn’t be surprised. You read it ‘often,’ remember?”

The jig was clearly up. “You know perfectly well I’ve never read that book.” She stared him down. “And if that’s what the illustrations are like, I shudder to think what’s in the text.”

“You have no idea.” He released an exasperated breath. “You, madam, are the most stubborn female I’ve ever met. If not for that picture, I wonder how far you’d have read before throwing the book at my head.”

“I’d never throw it at your head, sir.” She tilted up her chin. “Just into the fire.”

“I would have
your
head if you did. It’s damned difficult to obtain a copy of it. There are only a few hundred.”

“Yes, I can see why,” she said dryly. “The illustrations are very poorly rendered.”

He laughed full out. “They are indeed. Perhaps we should choose some other book.” His eyes gleamed at her. “One with art of a higher quality.”

“Or
writing
of a higher quality,” she countered. “Poetry, for example.” When he groaned, she added, “Lord Byron’s
Don Juan
ought to be just your cup of tea. Or perhaps some of Lord Rochester’s poems. I believe he used a great many naughty words.”

“I believe he did.” He picked up his glass to down some brandy. “But alas, there are no pictures.”

She forced a stern expression onto her face. “You, sir, are nothing more than an overgrown child.”

“Indeed I am,” he said without a trace of remorse. “That’s what happens when a man has no real childhood to speak of. He has to make up for it later.”

Even as she caught her breath to hear him reveal something about his past, he realized what he’d said and added, “But how the devil does a sheltered female like you know of
Don Juan
? Or Lord Rochester’s poems?”

“I’m not so sheltered as all that. As you well know, I was raised in a London orphanage.”

“Where they fed you on risqué poetry?” he quipped.

“Well, no. I found out about Lord Byron’s scandalous
Don Juan
from the newspaper.”

“Ah. So you haven’t actually read the poem.”

“I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure, no,” she said primly.

He lifted one eyebrow. “Trust me, you’d know if you had.”

“I suppose
you’ve
read it.”

“I have my own copy. But I don’t have Lord Rochester’s poems. So how did
you
get them?”

Heat rose in her cheeks. “I didn’t. Not exactly. When I served as paid companion to an elderly lady with a bachelor grandson, he gave me free access to his library, which contained a few . . . questionable books of verse.”

“That you decided to read?”

She scowled at him. “I didn’t
know
they were questionable until I read them, now, did I? And I happen to like verse. I’d read some of Lord Rochester’s more respectable poems, and I never guessed—”

“That he was such a naughty boy?”

“Exactly.” Her tone turned arch. “Apparently you’re not the only lord out there who’s a naughty boy.”

“We do get around.” He took another sip of brandy, then eyed her seriously over the rim of his glass. “And speaking of that—did this bachelor with the vulgar library ever behave as a naughty boy to
you
?”

“No more than you have.”

“I’ve been a perfect gentleman to you. For me, anyway.”

“Trying to blackmail me into your bed and then asking me to read naughty literature to you is not gentlemanly.”

“But it’s certainly entertaining,” he pointed out.

She rolled her eyes. “To answer your question, the bachelor grandson never laid a hand on me. For one thing, he lived in terror that his grandmother, my employer, would cut him off. For another, he had no time for me. He spent it all courting women with large fortunes.”