Yankee Earl (28 page)

      
Harry was about to make a rejoinder when young Master Barlow descended the stairs in a boyish rush. Excusing himself from the Dalberts and Evelyn Simmons, Jason bent down and hugged the boy as he flew into his arms. The two black-haired males made a handsome pair, looking as if they were indeed brothers by blood rather than adoption. Harry noted the way Rachel studied them, then commented slyly, "The earl has quite a way with children, does he not?"

      
“Tis his only redeeming trait that I have discerned to date,” Rachel replied acerbically.
A pity he will never see the child you may bear him…if you are fortunate enough to conceive.
The sudden thought caught her by surprise, and she felt suddenly lightheaded. There was no sense in even thinking about their wedding night. She might well be unable to go through with a seduction. What if he refused her? Laughed at her? How could she bear it?

      
Harry was speaking to her again, but Rachel could not make out what her sister was saying. Then Jason turned his attention from Fox to her as the lad caught sight of her and dashed excitedly in her direction, dragging his foster brother behind.

      
“Miss Fairchild, I am pleased to see you again,” Fox said in his most grown-up voice, trying in vain to hide his flush of excitement.

      
Rachel smiled as she and Harry greeted the lad. Roger, Garnet and her son joined the group, chatting amicably. Roger expressed great enthusiasm about the morrow's hunt. As everyone socialized, Rachel felt Jason's mocking blue eyes fixed on her. He had fully recovered from his brush with death in that waterfront tavern. Did he recall anything from their last encounter? She prayed that he had been too drunk to remember.

      
As he bowed over her hand, looking up into her eyes, she could not resist delivering a barb. “Your appearance is much improved from when last we met. The eye is healed. I doubt the blow to your thick skull caused any injury.”

      
“But of course not. What injury could not be mended by your excellent nursing?” he replied in that lazy American drawl, steering her aside for a private conversation.

      
Without creating a scene, she could do nothing but allow him the liberty of taking her arm. “If you had remained safely at home to drink yourself into a stupor, you would not have required my excellent nursing.”

      
“I am all the more in your debt for your Christian charity,” he replied dryly.

      
Rachel quickly freed her arm from his grip and placed a discreet distance between them. It was not propriety which motivated her, but self-preservation.

      
“Actually, I have but a small store of charity, Christian or otherwise. Do not use up any more of my scant supply. The next time, you may be left to the tender mercies of an assassin with no one to rescue you,” she replied tartly.

      
“I shall bear that in mind.” His tone was wry. Then, changing topics abruptly just as she was about to turn away and rejoin the rest of the guests, he asked, “Will you go on the hunt, Countess?”

      
“Twould be most impolite for me to refuse.”

      
“Ah, but in polite company you will not be able to straddle your mount and feel him pulsing beneath you, will you?” His voice was an insinuating whisper now, his smile sexually charged. And there was that accursed dimple again.

      
Damn the man! Rachel knew that any proper English lady should be highly insulted by such a vulgar double entendre. Harry would slap his face, then fall into a dead faint over such unimaginable crudity. In fact, Rachel could see her sister watching them with a bemused expression on her face. Harry was right. She was both too bookish and too hoydenish to ever make a proper English lady, which meant that she could reply to him in kind.

      
Smiling coolly, she said, “After your bare-arsed ride home from the pool, you certainly must be intimately acquainted with the feel of a horse beneath you.”

      
“That day 'twas not a horse's body beneath me that I had in mind, Countess,” he murmured as his eyes swept over the deep rose mull gown that swathed her tall, slender frame like a whispery caress.

      
Her blood pounded so swiftly she was certain her face must be the same shade as the dress. “If you were thinking of my body, you are doomed to grave disappointment, m'lord, for I am always in command…when I ride any dumb brute.”

      
He threw back his head and laughed. “Simply because she is astride does not mean that the woman is in command…or even wants to be.”

      
“I do.” Her eyes dared him, but her knees felt as weak as a newborn foal's.

      
He met her steady gaze with an appraising one of his own. “When the time comes I doubt the idea of command will even enter your mind. In fact, I doubt very much that you will be capable of thought at all.”

      
Rachel fought back a shiver of anticipation, her mind indeed as incapable of thought as he had boasted.

      
“I look forward to the hunt, Countess,” Jason said, his eyes revealing the hot hunger inside him.

      
Why was he playing this dangerous game with a woman who would shortly be able to claim his name? he wondered. He needed to avoid her, not pursue her. Yet the moment he had seen her standing in the foyer, glowing like a lush midsummer rose, he had been unable to stop himself. Dim memories of that night she and Drum had rescued him on the wharves flickered through his mind. Something about when she had treated his injuries, leaning over him in a gown that did not fit her…

      
Quite unlike the feathery soft mull that now showed off every curve. His eyes moved from the angry slash of her lips down her throat to those glorious breasts revealed so enticingly by the low neckline of her gown. Then the memory washed over him like spring rain. He had taken her breasts in his hands and felt the nipples harden, responding to his touch. But then—Jason sighed—he had fallen asleep. Did that explain her acerbic disposition tonight? He grinned at her, wondering if his supposition was correct.

      
She raised one eyebrow haughtily. “Best beware, m'lord, lest the hunter become the hunted.” With that, she swept past him and returned to the safety of her sister's idle chatter.

      
Fox had observed their exchange from a distance, puzzled by the strange combination of forced smiles and fierce frowns on their faces. They certainly did not act like any betrothed couples he had ever seen before. But his experience was limited to those courting in the Shawnee settlements. Maybe things were different in England. That was something to ask Jace when they talked in private later tonight. He would wait until the whole house was asleep, then slip from his room and go in search of his foster brother.

Chapter Fifteen

      
If Fox was concerned about Jason and Rachel, Harry was downright vexed. For the past two weeks her elder sister had been blue-deviled to the point of outright surliness. At first Harry had ascribed Rachel's ill temper to the fact that Jason had returned to Falconridge in the midst of the Little Season. Upon further consideration, she realized how absurd that was, since her sister despised social engagements. After Rachel hied herself back to Harleigh, Harry knew they must have had another quarrel. Certainly their behavior here at Roger's country house indicated as much.

      
But Harry was unable to get Rachel to confide in her, other than making disparaging remarks about the earl's inability to hold his liquor and his possessing the wits of a sand flea. With the wedding less than two weeks away, that did not augur well.

      
However, Lady Harriet Chalmers was a consummate matchmaker. And a hopeless romantic. By the time the soup course had been served at dinner that evening—with Rachel and the earl still exchanging barbs—she determined what she must do. It was apparent to anyone with half the wits of a sand flea that the earl passionately desired Rachel. And she, too stubborn to admit it, was quite in love with the rogue.

      
Those were just the right ingredients to turn a moonlit night in early autumn into the setting for a perfect tryst. Excusing herself after the trifle was served, Harry slipped upstairs and had her maid fetch paper and ink. After dinner the guests retired to their assigned rooms for a good night's rest before the early-morning fox hunt.

      
Rachel stood by the window, looking out at the bright moonlight bathing the gardens with a silvery glow. The fresh country air beckoned her. She was certainly too restless to sleep after an evening of verbal fencing with Jason. He had to be the most infuriating man she had ever had the misfortune to meet. One moment he was devouring her with his eyes as if he could not wait for their wedding night. Such desire would make her humiliating plans for seducing him utterly unnecessary. But then he would reverse himself and appear supremely indifferent, teasing her as if she were a spoiled child wanting a lesson in manners.

      
Ha! He was the one wanting for manners. She looked down at the note, crumpled, smoothed out, then crumpled once again and tossed into the fireplace. Of course, with the warm weather, there was no fire set, so the cream vellum just lay there, taunting her almost as much as its author would if she went to the rose garden to meet him. Which she would not.

      
Would she?

      
“Oh, bugger it,” she muttered angrily and stormed to the door. The tall case clock struck the quarter hour. Still thirty minutes before he'd asked her to meet him.

      
That would give her time to enjoy the fresh air and compose herself to do battle with Jason Beaumont, Earl of Falconridge. She strode down the hall as if daring anyone to question what she was doing out alone at this time of night. But not so much as a chambermaid appeared as she made her way downstairs, intending to let herself out one of the French doors in the dining room. Heavy puce-colored velvet draperies were drawn partially closed.

      
The interior of the house was furnished quite expensively, if not in the best of taste. Hideous gilt-encrusted tables and chairs squatted on claw feet with wings down their sides, rather like sinister beasts about to pounce on the unwary. Murals depicting classical mythology—Garnet's choice—and hunting scenes in gory detail, a sop to Roger's taste, filled every wall with clashing colors, mercifully muted now by dim moonlight. Huge Egyptian urns and cloisonné bric-a-brac filled every corner.

      
She picked her way through the costly obstacle course and slipped out the door onto the patio. Walking across the uneven stones, Rachel surveyed the grounds. In contrast to the interior, the exterior of the Dalberts' country estate looked quite down at the heels. Thick ivy vines worked their way up the sides of the brick walls and thrust impatient fingers into the mortar, loosening the masonry dangerously in many places. The late-blooming roses were sadly neglected, blighted and weed-choked. In the distance the moonlight glistened off puddles in the deep ruts of the drive. Rachel's coach had nearly broken a spring while making its way to the front entry.

      
“I suppose Mistress Dalbert is more interested in running her shipping business than an estate,” she said softly to herself. Roger, whose antecedents had lived on this land for hundreds of years, appeared blissfully unaware of how poorly the servants and tenants tended his grounds and fields. It seemed to Rachel that he should be concerned, but it really was none of her affair. The couple appeared quite devoted to each other.

      
She and Jason were just the opposite. Of course, after the war he could resume running his shipping interests and she could manage their combined estates…if they had a real marriage. What was she doing, woolgathering such a fantasy! He would be gone, and she would be alone for the rest of her life. Just as she had always wished to be.

      
Then why are you so miserable at the thought of it?

      
Rachel shook off the insistent inner voice and stomped down the well-worn stone staircase to the rose garden. Just like the lobcock to be late after summoning her. Was he hiding behind an overgrown hedge somewhere, laughing at her for being taken in by his joke?

      
Jason stood bemused in the shadows of the big house, watching Rachel move among the roses, stooping now and then to pull a weed or smell a bloom.
'Tis the farmer in her,
he thought with a smile as he watched the way her lush hips swayed when she straightened up. Being here was not a wise idea.

      
He had almost decided to remain in his room and ignore her message, but then he'd reconsidered. The mule-headed chit was just nervy enough to come rapping on his door in the middle of the night. He had delayed approaching her for half an hour, hoping that she would grow impatient and give up. But she had not given up.

      
And here he was, making, as Drum would say, an utter cake of himself. He watched with a grin when she squatted in the dirt and used a twig to dig out a particularly recalcitrant vine menacing one of the rose bushes. No prim vaporing miss, this one. The thought occurred to him that they could rub on rather well with her in charge of the estates and him overseeing his shipping interests and the marquess' investments. He snorted at the daydream. Within a week's time together, they would be at each other's throats—when they were not in bed.