Waking Up With a Rake (9 page)

“Tell me you haven’t been thinking about that kiss, Olivia.” His masculine scent, all saddle leather and spicy bergamot, crowded her senses. “Haven’t you been wondering what comes next?”

He was a libertine. A rake. A cad. How many women had lost their resolve to this whisky-voiced, blindingly handsome man? Olivia gave herself a stern mental shake.

“Here’s what comes next, Lord Rhys.” She slapped his cheek in a stinging blow. Then she lifted her skirt and ran toward the main house, heedless of the falling snow.

Chapter 8

“Absolutely harrowing, that’s what it was,” Mrs. Symon was saying to the aging Baron Ramstead at her right hand at the long dining table. Flickers from the centrally placed candelabra bathed Olivia’s mother in the most flattering light. Rhys suspected Mrs. Symon had been something of a village beauty when she was a girl and hadn’t ever gotten over not being the center of attention.

Rhys occupied the place to her left “as a mark of special favor” Mrs. Symon had declared before the party settled into their chairs. After three courses of non-stop histrionics from his hostess, Rhys didn’t feel so favored. The only bright spot was that Olivia was seated next to the baron, kitty-corner across from him. She was close enough he could send her looks that made her squirm to his heart’s content.

Rhys didn’t regard that slap she’d given him as a setback. In fact, it was proof positive he’d struck a nerve with his offer to educate her. If her occasional flush of color was any indication, he’d wager the entire contents of his wallet that Olivia had thought about his indecent proposal more than once since they sat down to dine.

Lord knew he had.

Mrs. Symon signaled for the footmen to clear the plates of poultry and bring on the beef. “I swear that girl scared a year off my life today.”

“Mother, by the time you learned about the accident, I was standing right beside you,” Olivia protested.

“But only think what might have been.” Mrs. Symon put a hand to her breast, no doubt believing it an affecting gesture of motherly concern. “And in the presence of His Highness’s representative too. Imagine how the Duke of Clarence would have taken the news if you’d tumbled into that horrid chasm. I told your father he ought to do something about that ravine. It’s not safe to have such a dangerous natural feature on the place. If I told the man once, I’ve told him a thousand times.”

Rhys didn’t doubt that for a moment.

Mrs. Symon kept talking, but Rhys was adept at only seeming to listen. Instead he surreptitiously swept the dinner party with his gaze, wishing he could ferret out their secrets simply by looking at them.

After Olivia had stormed out of the stable and back to the house, he’d learned something that changed the nature of his business at Barrowdell completely.

Oh, he still intended to bed the girl. That was a given and not just to meet Mr. Alcock’s requirements. Olivia Symon had done something no other woman had since he returned from Maubeuge.

She made him feel something beyond mere lust.

He had no name for it, but he thought bedding her was the best way to learn what it might be. Olivia was fast becoming an itch he couldn’t wait to scratch. But now he needed to protect her as well.

Her riding accident hadn’t been so accidental.

While he’d waited for Mr. Thatcher to return with Molly, Rhys had examined the sidesaddle. The leather was thin where the girth attached. It was likely to fail if undue pressure was put on it. For instance, if the horse should happen to begin to buck and rear.

And a long thorn had worked its way into the padding under the saddle. If Rhys had found only one of those things, he’d merely have thought Mr. Thatcher was singularly unreliable. Together, the worn girth and the thorn suggested skullduggery. When Olivia took that jump over the hedgerow, as anyone who was familiar with her riding habits knew she would, the sharp spike would have jabbed the mare’s back, triggering the saddle’s failure.

It was cunningly done. Even if the thorn was discovered, there was no way to prove it hadn’t gotten there by accident. And leather wore over time. If Olivia had ended up at the bottom of the ravine, it might have been days before someone became curious about the cause of the accident and thought to look. By then, the perpetrator could have covered up those two bits of evidence.

When Mr. Thatcher returned to the stable with Molly, Rhys had snatched him up by his collar and confronted him with his findings. The man’s weathered face grew red with indignation over Rhys’s accusations.

“I put that little miss on her first pony, your lordship,” Thatcher had said with a glint of fury in his eye. “I’d sooner take a whipping than see her come to harm.”

“At the very least you were negligent in saddling her horse,” Rhys said, thrusting the man away in disgust. He heard truth in Thatcher’s tone. The groom wasn’t the culprit, but that didn’t excuse incompetence. “Why didn’t you check it?”

“Molly was already saddled when I come in this morning with a note affixed from Mrs. Symon ordering this saddle be used so her daughter would have to ride aside. Miss Olivia and her mother go round about that, you’ll collect. In any case, I figured Davy had handled Molly’s tack so’s I wouldn’t have to. We pick up slack for each other like that. I didn’t think nothing about it at the time.”

Rhys had demanded the note and tucked it into his pocket. He’d found a sample of Mrs. Symon’s handwriting later in the afternoon and compared it to the note on the saddle. Whoever forged the note was good, but there were enough differences in the script to make him doubt that Olivia’s mother had sent it.

He and Mr. Thatcher both cornered the stable lad, but Davy denied having done anything but muck out stalls and pick the dray horse’s hooves that morning. And since the big workhorse was housed in the far portion of the long stable and didn’t generally cooperate when his hooves needed attention, Davy hadn’t noticed anyone lurking about Molly’s stall.

There was a chance the culprit was a servant who might have gone unremarked, but in his research on the Symons, Rhys had learned that they paid their people very well. The staff was given regular half-day liberties and alternate all day Sundays. The below stairs dining room was always generously set. It wouldn’t make sense for one of the staff to turn on so openhanded an employer.

Rhys thought it more likely that whoever tampered with the sidesaddle was seated at the long dining table, breaking bread with Miss Symon.

So he studied his dinner companions with a jaundiced eye. There was the geriatric Baron Ramstead and his much younger baroness. The lady was seated to Rhys’s right. It was a good thing she was attractive because she didn’t seem to have the brains of a peewit.

Next to Olivia was a Mr. Winfield Stubbs, a portly fellow with a nose like a misshapen rutabaga and jowls to rival a bloodhound. Despite his unfortunate appearance, he was reputedly a great friend of Mr. Symon from his days in India. Mr. Stubbs was a dedicated trencherman and had remarked several times to no one in particular, “Splendid table, what? M’compliments to the chef.”

Next to him, Lady Harrington, a distant relation of Mr. Symon, was seated. The dowager viscountess, still a handsome woman though she’d never see fifty again, was resplendent in dark silk and ropes of matched gray pearls.

“You see, Lord Rhys, we Symons are not without nobility in our lineage,” Mrs. Symon had said as an aside when introductions were made before supper. “In fact, given the right circumstances, my own dear Mr. Symon might inherit the Harrington title one day.”

“By right circumstances, she means the deaths of Lady Harrington’s five strapping sons and all their twenty-six children,” Olivia had mumbled under her breath when her mother and the viscountess moved on.

Across from Lady Harrington, a Lord Percy was flirting rather shamelessly with the young baroness and didn’t even flinch when the lady’s husband cast him a pointedly wicked glare.

Nothing
to
fear
from
a
toothless
lion,
Rhys figured Percy had decided.

When the baroness began ignoring him, Percy turned his attention to Miss Amanda Pinkerton, who sat on his right side. With a few artful blandishments he had the dark-eyed beauty blushing in no time. Evidently, Lord Percy was a flirt of opportunity, not strategy.

“I say, Miss Pinkerton,” he said, “I do hope you’ll save a spot on your dance card for me when you arrive in London. You’ll have the young bucks lining up, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“Amanda is being brought out by Lady Cowper and won’t have much say in the composition of her dance cards.” Doctor Nigel Pinkerton, Amanda’s father, glowered at Percy from his position across the table on Lady Harrington’s left.

Rhys decided there were no flies on Pinkerton. He respected men who protected their women. In short order, Pinkerton had sized up Percy and arrived at the correct number. The doctor had also befriended Horatio Symon when they were both in India. In fact, Amanda was born there and had only recently made the long cruise home with her father in order to have a proper London Season come spring. From what Rhys could gather from cryptic mentions, her mother, like many an English rose, had wilted and died in the East.

The last guest at the table was Colonel Billiter. He too had spent time on the Asian subcontinent, but served in the military instead of working to develop trade as Horatio Symon had done. If he’d heard of Rhys’s less than distinguished service in France, the colonel gave no sign when Olivia’s mother had introduced them.

The table was long enough to accommodate another twelve guests without crowding. The extra chairs were empty at present, as was the seat at the distant head of the table. With so many of his purported friends gathered round, Mr. Symon was conspicuous by his absence.

Mrs. Symon had assured Rhys that all the places would be filled by week’s end. A much larger house party was planned as soon as the general mourning for Princess Charlotte was lifted.

“We’ll have a sober little party of friends and family until then. Once it’s decently possible, we’ll shake off the winter doldrums with finer festivities,” Mrs. Symon had told him grandly. “We don’t want you to report back to the Duke of Clarence that we country mice are deadly dull.”

But no matter who joined them in the days to come, Rhys marked the members of this “sober little party of friends and family.” One of them, he was sure, had tried to harm the host’s eldest daughter.

Why? Which of them stood to gain if Olivia didn’t wed the Duke of Clarence?

Mrs. Symon was still worrying the topic of Olivia’s “accident,” picking at it as if she might unravel the horror of it like a knitter unravels a misshapen row of stitches. “I swear, I feel an attack of the vapors coming on every time I think about what might have happened to our dear Olivia.”

“What about what
did
happen to poor Molly,” Olivia said softly. Rhys heard guilt in her tone.

“She’s still alive and, with any luck, will remain so,” Rhys said. By the time he’d left the stable that morning, the head groom had rigged a tackle and sling so the mare’s front half was lifted off the ground, giving the injured joint a chance to heal. “Mr. Thatcher is making every effort to save her.”

He was rewarded by Olivia’s small smile of gratitude for his understanding, but then she turned her gaze to her plate, refusing to look at him again.

Mrs. Symon recaptured the conversational ball. “Well, horse doctoring aside, thank heaven Lord Rhys was there to save the day.”

“Hear, hear,” Lord Percy said, taking the opportunity to clink his glass with the baroness’s again.

“You know, Miss Symon.” Mr. Stubbs nudged Olivia with his elbow between stuffing great bites of beef into his gaping maw. “In some cultures when a man saves a person’s life, that person is bound to him from that time forth.”

Olivia shot a glance at Rhys from under her sooty lashes. “I hardly think Lord Rhys is the sort who wishes to have a woman bound to him for any length of time. Certainly not from this time forth.”

Mr. Stubbs laughed, a disgusting cross between a snuffle and a runaway case of hiccups. “Show me a man who does! The parson’s mousetrap is the bane of the male race.”

“I don’t generally hold with what the heathen do, but the principle you describe, Mr. Stubbs, is a sound one,” old Lord Ramstead said. “Here in Christian England, we honor our debts. Surely we all owe Lord Rhys hearty thanks for snatching the dear girl from the jaws of death.”

“Jaws of death,” Mrs. Symon repeated, giving a little moan as her eyelids fluttered. She fanned herself rapidly, then stiffened as her eyes rolled back in her head. Finally she slumped gracefully in her chair, like a feather descending lightly to earth. It took Rhys a moment to realize she’d fainted. He leaped to his feet, patting her wrists and calling for smelling salts.

Olivia wasn’t inclined to wait for salts. She rose from her place with her water glass in hand, dipped her fingers into the liquid, and then flicked them at her mother’s face. Beatrice Symon sputtered and sat bolt upright, casting Olivia an irritated glare.

“Good thing you came to, Mother,” she said tight-lipped. “I was just about to empty the whole glass on you.”