A Wild Pursuit (8 page)

“There.” He pointed to the right. The damned goat was chewing up her very best hat. The green plume hung drunkenly from his mouth, and he seemed to be grinning at her.

Bea started up with a shriek of rage.

“I think not!” The Puritan had arms like steel. He didn't pay a bit of attention to her wiggling, just picked her up and turned her around. When she looked up at his face, she suddenly stopped protesting.

He didn't kiss like a Puritan. Or an old man either.

He kissed like a hungry man. Bea's first sensation was triumph. So the Puritan had pretended that he didn't notice her charms. Ha! That was all an act. He was just…he was just like…but then somehow, insidiously, she lost her train of thought.

He was kissing her so sweetly, as if she were the merest babe in arms. He didn't even seem to wish to push his tongue into her mouth. Instead he rubbed his lips against hers, danced on her mouth, his hands cupping her head so tenderly that she almost shivered. She quite liked this.

Oh, she felt his tongue. It sung on her lips, patient and tasting like raspberries. Without thinking, her own tongue tangled with his for a second. Then she realized what she was doing and clamped her mouth shut. There was nothing she hated more than a man pushing his great tongue where it didn't belong.

But he didn't. His lips drifted across her face and pressed her eyes shut, and then closed back on her lips with a ravenous hunger that made her soften, ache deep inside.

He probably thinks I'm a virgin, Bea thought in a foggy sort of way.

His mouth was leaving little trails of fire. He was nibbling her ear, and she was tingling all over. In fact, she wanted—she wanted him to try again. Come back, she coaxed silently, turning her face toward his lips. Try to kiss me, really kiss me. But he didn't. Instead, his tongue curled around the delicate whorls of her ear, and Bea made a hoarse sound in her throat. He answered it by nipping her earlobe, which sent another twinge deep between her legs.

He tugged her hair and she obediently tipped her face back, eyes closed, and allowed him to taste her throat, all the time begging silently that he return, return, kiss her again…But he seemed to be feasting on her throat. She opened her mouth to say something, but at that moment he apparently decided he had tormented her enough, and his mouth closed over hers.

She could no more fight that masculine strength than she could rise to her feet. He didn't coax this time; he took, and she gave. And it wasn't like all the other times, when she'd tolerated a moment or two of this kind of kissing. The Puritan's kiss was dark and sweet and savage all at once. It sent quivers through her legs and made her strain to be closer. His hands moved down her back, assured, possessive. In a moment he would bring them around to her front, and her breasts were aching for…

That was the thought that woke Bea. She hadn't been thinking of grappling in the field when she'd dressed in the morning. These particular breasts weren't meant to withstand a man's hand. There was more cotton than flesh. She tore her mouth away, gasping, and stared at him. She didn't even think about giving him a seductive glance. She was too stunned.

“I like you when you're like this,” he said, and there was that sweetness to his eyes again. He reached out and rubbed a splatter of mud from her cheek. “You look rain-washed and very young. Also rather startled. It seemed to me that you've been inviting kisses. Was I wrong?”

“No,” she said, trying hard to think what to say next. All her practiced seductive lines seemed to have fled from her head.

“Alas,” he said, even more gently, tucking her hair behind her ear. “I can hardly offer marriage to a woman half my age. So I'm afraid that I shall have to leave your kisses, sweet though they are, to some younger man.”

Bea's mouth almost fell open. Marriage? Didn't he know who she was? “I don't want—” she began, but her voice was hoarse. She stopped. “As it happens, I am not interested in marriage either,” she said quite sedately. “I find that I am, however, very interested in
you
.” She twisted forward and kissed his lips, a promise of pleasure. And she was absolutely honest about that. With him, there would be no boundaries.

But it was he who pulled back. She had been so sure he would lunge at her that she'd smiled—but the smile faded.

He
was
a Puritan. His eyes had gone cold, dark, condemning. “I thought you played the lusty trollop for fun.”

She raised her chin. “Actually, no,” she said, and she was very pleased to find her tone utterly calm and with just a hint of sarcasm. “I play myself.”

“Yourself? Do you even know who you are, under all that face paint?”

“I assure you that I do.”

“You play a part you needn't,” he said, eyes fixed on hers. “You are young and beautiful, Beatrix. You should marry and have children.”

“I think not.”

“Why?”

“You simply want to make me like everyone else,” she said sharply. “I like wearing
macquillage.
I would rather not look like
myself,
as you put it. And I find it incalculably difficult to imagine myself sitting by the fire wearing a lace cap and chattering about my brood of children.”

“I think
yourself
is beautiful. All your paints have washed away at the moment. You never needed them.”

“I didn't say I needed them. I enjoy them,” she retorted, and then added, deliberately, “just as I occasionally enjoy the company of a man in my bedchamber.”

For a moment they just looked at each other, Puritan to trollop. “Am I to understand that you are not interested in taking a mistress?” she asked, meeting his eyes. She was no child to be whipped by his condemnation.

“Actually, I am,” he said. “But I have little interest in one so…practiced.”

Bea got to her feet, shaking out her skirts. Then she bent over and picked up her mangled spencer, shaking it out and folding it over her arm, taking a moment to make absolutely certain that her face wouldn't reveal even for a second what she felt.

“I have often noticed that men of your years seem to overprize naiveté,” she replied calmly.

He showed no reaction, but her quip was so untrue that she gained no joy from saying it. He wasn't old. Suddenly, she decided to be honest. Looking him in the eye, she said, “That was cruel, and quite shabby, Mr. Fairfax-Lacy. I would not have expected it of you.”

“I'm sorry.”

She nodded and began to turn toward the gate. After all, she'd had much worse things said to her, mostly by women, but then there was her dear father. So when he caught her arm, she turned toward him with a little smile that was almost genuine.

“Don't you think we should take our bedraggled selves home?”

There was real anguish in his eyes. “I feel like the worst sort of bastard. Kissing you in a field and then insulting you.”

At that, she grinned. “I gather you wish I were an innocent, Mr. Fairfax-Lacy. But I am not. I truly enjoyed that kiss.” The smile she gave him was as wicked and lazy as any she'd ever bestowed on a man. “And I would very much have enjoyed your company in my bedchamber as well. But I have never forced myself on a man. I fully understand that you are looking for a far more respectable mistress.” Helene was an altogether perfect alternative.

At that moment, Bea made up her mind. Helene would never be able to lure the Puritan on her own. She, Beatrix, would have to help, if only to prove that she didn't hold grudges, even when rejected. She would give him to Helene as a present.

She turned and made her way across the field, and when the goat rolled his wicked eyes and snapped his lips over a Pomona green satin ribbon, all that remained of her bonnet, she just smiled at him.

Which startled the animal so much that he galloped off to the other end of the field, leaving her hat behind.

T
o Esme's great relief, Mrs. Cable swept into her morning parlor on the very strike of ten o'clock. Esme had been putting crooked stitches into a sheet for at least five, perhaps even ten, minutes and hadn't got further than two hands' lengths. She hastily bundled the sheet to the side to greet her guest.

“My goodness, Lady Rawlings!” Mrs. Cable said. “How very becoming that cap looks on you! You are verily an illustration of the good book of Timothy, which says that women should adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety rather than gold and pearls.”

Esme touched her head self-consciously. It was the very first time that she had ever worn a cap, and she felt like a fool. Like one of those Renaissance fools, with bells hanging off their caps. It felt like rank hypocrisy, as if wearing a trifling bit of lace on top of one's head would make up for the fact that two days ago she'd reveled in indecencies with her gardener. One could only imagine what would happen if her guest knew the truth!

Esme pushed away that thought and offered Mrs. Cable some tea.

“I would be grateful,” Mrs. Cable said, plumping herself onto the settee next to Esme, and showing no inclination whatsoever to pick up an unhemmed piece of cotton. “For a body must have sustenance, and that's a fact!”

“I quite agree,” Esme said, pouring tea into a cup and ruthlessly repressing visions of other kinds of bodily sustenance, types of which she doubted Mrs. Cable would approve quite so heartily.

Mrs. Cable sipped and raised her eyebrows. “She is like the merchants' ships; she bringeth her food from afar.”

Esme was not someone with a facility in biblical verses. Oddly enough, contact with Mrs. Cable seemed to be increasing her irritation rather than her piety. “Indeed?”

“Proverbs,” Mrs. Cable said briskly. “This
is
India tea, is it not? An expense, a dear expense, but quite delicious. I have brought with me six sheets, which I managed to hem in my spare time this week.”

“How marvelously industrious you are!” Esme gushed. She herself couldn't seem to sew anything except under the direct supervision of the Circle itself, so she never participated in the weekly count of completed sheets.

“You must have a great deal of time on your hands these days, Lady Rawlings.”

Esme resisted the temptation to tell Mrs. Cable that having a houseful of dissolute guests made for rather a lot of work. “So one would think.”

Luckily Slope opened the door. “Lady Winifred,” he announced, “and Mrs. Barret-Ducrorq.”

“What a pleasure to see you, Mrs. Barret-Ducrorq,” Esme exclaimed. “And here we thought you were enjoying yourself in London and we wouldn't see you until the season ended!”

“We are all assembled,” Mrs. Cable put in, “as when the good book says that the elders were assembled.”

“I'd take it as a personal compliment if you'd not refer to me as an
elder,
Mrs. Cable,” Mrs. Barret-Ducrorq snapped. “Lucy and I have fled London for a week or so. The poor girl is quite, quite worn out by all the festivities. As am I,” she added, looking remarkably robust. “Sponsoring a debut is a quite exhausting business.” Mrs. Barret-Ducrorq's sister had recently died, leaving her to administer her niece's debut.

“And by all accounts, Lucy is having a particularly exciting time,” Lady Winifred said with a good-natured chuckle. Lady Winifred had three grown daughters living in London; while she no longer traveled to the city for the season, she seemed to know of even the tiniest event.

Mrs. Barret-Ducrorq leveled a glare at Lady Winifred, who was demurely threading a needle. “I expect that, as always, accounts of the incident have been grossly exaggerated.”

Mrs. Cable's eyes were bulging out with pure excitement. “Never tell me that something happened to sweet Miss Aiken! Your niece could not create a scandal. There must be some mistake!”

Mrs. Barret-Ducrorq's mouth twisted. She was a rather corpulent woman, whose body seemed to have focused itself in her bosom; it jutted below her chin like the white cliffs of Dover. Generally, she had an air of victory, but today she looked rather deflated.

Esme put down her sheet. “What on earth has happened to Miss Aiken?” she asked. Lucy Aiken had always seemed a pallidly unimaginative girl and certainly not one to achieve notoriety.

“It's her father's blood coming out,” Mrs. Barret-Ducrorq said heavily.

Mrs. Cable gasped. “Never say so!”

“I do say so! If my sister hadn't married beneath her, none of this would have happened!”

“It didn't sound particularly outrageous to me,” Lady Winifred observed, turning the corner on her hem. “After all, many girls do foolish things in their first season. It's almost expected. And it's not as if she created some sort of true scandal!”

Aha, Esme thought to herself. That would have been my role…in the old days. She was astounded that neither Mrs. Barret-Ducrorq nor Lady Winifred had mentioned her cap. Did they really think she was old enough, stodgy enough, widowed enough, to wear one of these? Even Arabella didn't wear a cap!

“My niece insulted the great Brummell himself,” Mrs. Barret-Ducrorq said heavily.

“What on earth did Miss Aiken say to him?” Esme asked, fascinated despite herself. She'd often wanted to insult Brummell.

“He did her the inestimable honor of complimenting her complexion, and then asked what preparation she used on her freckles.” Mrs. Barret-Ducrorq shuddered. “Lucy was rather tired, and apparently she did not entirely understand the breadth of Mr. Brummell's importance in the
ton.
Or so she tells me.”

“And?” Mrs. Cable said.

“She snapped at the man,” Mrs. Barret-Ducrorq admitted. “She informed him that any preparations she chose to use on her complexion were her business, and no one else's.”

“The snare of vanity,” Mrs. Cable said darkly.

“The vanity is all Mr. Brummell's,” Esme pointed out. “The man takes a spiteful delight in pointing out the faults that one most wants to hide.”

“She loathes her freckles,” Mrs. Barret-Ducrorq said. “I blame them on her father's side of the family. We have nothing of the sort in
our
family, and so I have told Lucy, time out of mind.”

“Vanity—,” Mrs. Cable put in.

Everyone ignored her. “You were right to bring poor Lucy to the country for a week,” Lady Winifred said. “Everyone will have forgotten by next Monday.”

“True enough. More importantly, has she met any gentlemen whom she finds acceptable?” Esme put in.

Mrs. Barret-Ducrorq looked slightly more cheerful. “Several gentlemen have paid her marked attention. I am hopeful that they will overlook both her slip of the tongue and the freckles.”

“Poor Lucy just didn't understand that we fairly beg Mr. Brummell to be discourteous to us,” Esme said. “He's a horrid little beast, and so I shall tell Lucy when I see her.”

“Lady Rawlings!” Mrs. Cable said with a gasp. “Mr. Brummell is a leader of the
ton!
It would never do for Miss Aiken to insult him yet again.”

Esme bit her lip before she retorted that she too was a leader of the
ton,
and knew better than Mrs. Cable what a song and dance one was supposed to make before the great Brummell. Or the
penniless
Brummell, as was rumored.

At that moment the door opened, and Arabella swept in. “Ah, this must be my niece's group of virtuous laborers,” she said, laughing. “I thought I'd join you and bring a little frivolity to lighten your exertions!”

“How kind of you,” Esme said, giving Arabella a pointed look. If she undermined Esme's new respectability, Esme would have to flay her, relative or no. She had sewn too many sheets to give up her place in the Circle now. “Ladies, may I present my aunt, the Dowager Viscountess Withers? Aunt, this is Mrs. Cable, Mrs. Barret-Ducrorq, and—”

“Winifred!” Arabella crowed. “How are you, dear girl?”

Esme watched, rather stupefied, as Lady Winifred came to her feet with a great creaking of stays and Arabella bounded into her embrace. Lady Winifred was a florid woman with a bewildering range of acquaintances. Still, Esme wouldn't have put her aunt among them, given that Lady Winifred spent a great deal of her time impugning the reputations of women with far fewer sins than had Arabella. Perhaps Lady Winifred was losing her memory.

“I haven't seen you in an age!” Lady Winifred boomed. “It's all my fault, of course. I've grown as large as a horse, and as lazy as one too. Nowadays I loathe London.”

“I know just what you mean,” Arabella said, patting her hand. “There are days when I feel every bone in my aged body and I can't think of a single activity that might please me.”

Esme just stopped herself from rolling her eyes. Arabella was wearing an utterly charming and provocative morning gown made of a cotton so light it floated on the breeze. If she didn't look precisely youthful, she did appear to have a good twenty years before she'd feel even a touch of rheumatism.

The look on Mrs. Cable's face made it clear that she, at least, was having no trouble remembering the kind of activities for which Arabella was famed. “How unusual to find such a distinguished personage in Limpley-Stoke,” she said with a titter. “I'm afraid that you'll find our little village quite drab!”

Esme suddenly saw Mrs. Cable through her aunt's eyes. Mrs. Cable's small, dark eyes were glistening with dislike. Her mouth was thinned with contempt. The worst thing of all, from Arabella's point of view, would be the fact that Mrs. Cable was wearing a dress of pomona green poplin, just the color to emphasize the sallow color of her cheeks.

“No place that contained my niece could be tedious!” Arabella replied, whisking herself into a chair. “I do believe I would even travel to America to see her. And that's a profound compliment, as I'm sure you all know how sea air can ruin one's complexion.”

“I am honored,” Esme said, pouring Arabella a cup of tea. “Thank goodness you needn't go to such lengths, dear aunt. At your age,” she added.

Arabella narrowed her eyes at her. “I see you've taken up wearing a cap, dearest niece. At your age.”

Lady Winifred had settled herself back with a length of cotton. “I won't offer you a piece of this, Arabella,” she said with a booming laugh. “I don't think of you as a needle-mistress!”

“But of course, you're right,” Arabella agreed. “I can't sew to save my life.”

“Sometimes these sheets are all that come between the poor and the cold floor,” Mrs. Cable said pointedly. “Whoso stoppeth his ear at the cry of the poor, she also shall cry herself and not be heard.”

Rag-mannered, Esme thought to herself. Could Miles truly have wished her to spend time with the likes of Mrs. Cable?

Apparently Lady Winifred agreed with Esme's assessment. “I have been meaning to mention to you, Mrs. Cable, that there is something just slightly vulgar about quoting the Bible, unless, of course, it is the vicar himself who ventures to recite.”

Mrs. Cable thrust back her head, rather like a rooster preparing to battle an impudent hen, and said, “I fear not, but testify unto every man.”

Arabella raised one eyebrow and said pleasantly, “My goodness, you do seem to have the Bible at your fingertips. I do congratulate you. It is such an unusual skill to find among the gently bred.”

Mrs. Cable turned a deepish puce color. Arabella turned to Mrs. Barret-Ducrorq with her charming smile. “I don't believe we've met. But as it happens, I did meet your delightful ward, Miss Aiken, just two weeks ago, at Almack's. Sally Jersey introduced me. We both thought her manners were remarkably engaging, with very little of that strident awkwardness that seems rampant this season, and I certainly applauded Sally's decision to give her a voucher to Almack's.”

Mrs. Barret-Ducrorq had silently watched the skirmish between Arabella and Mrs. Cable to this point, but she was instantly wooed and won.

“That is tremendously kind of you, Lady Withers,” she said, putting her sewing to the side, “and I must ask you a question. I have been longing to know the truth behind the Countess of Castignan's extraordinary marriage, and I expect you know all about it.”

Arabella laughed. “Well, as to that, Petronella is one of my dearest friends….”

Esme risked a look at Mrs. Cable. She was sitting like a dour crow, stitching so quickly that her needle was a blur. Even for the sake of Miles, her departed—if not terribly dear—husband, could she contemplate a lifetime in Mrs. Cable's company?