Tuthill spit to the side but did not move the blade. “I told her lack of sex’d make a man violent.” He pressed the knife a little harder. “Lack of these might cure the problem. Works on horses all right.” Gard released his hold on the smaller man’s shoulders, cautiously stepping back out of range. “Insolent bastard.”
“Arrogant lecher.”
They traded insults like boys in a schoolyard until Rob turned his head to spit, taking care to avoid Clyde. As he turned back, a pistol fired, the ball taking his knife right out of his hand. “Just an accident,” he called out to the shouted queries, and “Damn good shot,” to the earl. Then he went on. “Way I see it, my sticker’s gone but your rattler’s empty. What do you want to do now?”
“I want to go inside, and I am bigger, stronger, and younger.”
Rob nodded. “You might get in, or you might not. Either way, you won’t get out to see the dawn. I got so many crimes in my dish, killin’ a nob won’t make the noose any tighter.”
“I’ll bet you do, you old horse thief. Lucky for you I’m not a violent man.”
“Too bad for you I am. And you might be bigger ’n all that, but I know more dirty tricks.”
“I’ll bet you do,” Gard said again, losing patience with the stable hand, if that’s what he was. “So are you going to try to stop me or not?”
“Depends on what you’re lookin’ for in there.” Rob jerked his head toward the house.
“Revenge, mostly.”
“Can’t argue with that. Figure you’ve got a right. What else, though?”
Gard snarled, angry at the thought of an earl seeking permission to go courting from a thatchgallows horse groomer. “What are you, her father or something, that I have to declare my intentions?”
“Someone’s got to, looks like.”
“Oh, stubble it already. Enough. I am still a gentleman.”
Tuthill was satisfied with that, enough to curl up in his makeshift bed in an empty stall with Clyde for company. He wished the earl luck.
*
Ross went around to the front door and knocked. Annie opened the door and curtsied, then looked beyond the earl for his companion.
“No, Annie, I have no lady friend with me tonight, but I am sure your diabolical mind had something planned for our entertainment. What was it to be, poisoned toadstools? Leaking roof? Rocks in the mattress?”
Drat, she wished she’d thought of half of those! All she had were some overfed mice that wouldn’t scare a grasshopper. Then she realized he was standing in the parlor, legs spread apart, arms crossed across his chest, scowling fiercely from under lowered brows like some seafaring brigand. “Are…are you very angry, my lord?”
“Angry? No, I wouldn’t call it anger. Mind-numbing blood rage is more like it, Annie. You know, when all you can see is red in front of your eyes and smoke starts pouring from your ears and you—”
He had no hat or gloves for her to take, but he did have a pistol tucked in his waistband. Annie started backing toward the door. Gard stepped that way, blocking her retreat.
“I have another idea for this evening, since you have frightened away all of my other interests.” His voice was low, measured, implacable. “I thought you might provide the night’s entertainment.”
Annie glanced toward the pianoforte and licked her dry lips. “I don’t think I could—”
“Oh, no, Annie, music wasn’t at all what I had in mind.” He took a step toward her, close enough for her to see the twitching of his jaw muscles. She backed up until her legs hit the sofa. When she couldn’t go any farther without putting herself in an even more disadvantageous position, Annalise crossed her own arms over her own chest. She refused to be intimidated, she told herself, trying desperately to keep her knees from knocking together so loudly that he must hear them. She raised her chin defiantly. “I do not want to—”
“No. Tonight we do what I want. What I’ve been wanting to do since the day I met you.” He put his strong hands on her shoulders, dislodging the shoulder pad that made her look deformed. Then he moved his fingers closer to her throat.
“My lord?” Her voice was at least an octave higher than normal.
“What, Annie, frightened? Just as those women were frightened by what they saw? Just as I was frightened, thinking I could never—”
“What…what are you going to do, my lord?”
“This,” he declared, pulling the green-tinted spectacles off her nose and throwing them into the hearth, where they shattered with a tinkle of glass. The fear in her eyes sent a twinge of remorse through Gard, but only a twinge. This was ugly Annie, sharp-tongued Annie, Annie the trickster, who had made his life hell. “And this.” He grabbed that awful cap off her head, releasing the silver curls, but he did not stop there. While one hand stayed fastened to her shoulder in an iron grip, the other used the muslin fabric to scrub her face. He did not even try to be gentle as he rid her of the disfiguring mole and the yellowish powder. “And this,” he moaned, pulling her into his arms at last. She was brave and beautiful Annie, clever Annie, Annalise, who was his. “Oh, God, I have waited so long to—” Holding her in his arms was not the unalloyed delight he was expecting. In fact, it felt somewhat like embracing a boy, he imagined. He jumped back as if scalded. “Damn and blast, whatever you’ve done to your body, undo it!”
Annalise blushed. Or was her face red from his scrubbing? “Here, my lord?”
“It’s Gard, dash it. And I refuse to call you Miss Avery, not when you’ve led me such a dance. I’ll try for Annalise if you wish, but I’m afraid you’ll always be Annie to me.”
“Annie sounds fine.” Always sounded better. “I’ll, ah, go fix my gown,” she said with a shy smile.
“You’ll get rid of that monstrosity altogether, my sweet, or I’ll throw it in the fire along with your cap. And hurry. We have a great deal to discuss.”
*
In a daze Annalise unbuttoned her gown and unwrapped the binding around her chest. She was alive and he still wanted her. Two miracles in one night! She grinned, standing there in her chemise, thinking that the night was still young. Then she took to wondering what to wear. Not another of her black gowns, for she had no desire to kindle Gard’s rage, and definitely not her heavy riding habit. Her flannel nightrail? Never.
She slipped up the back stairway and surveyed the selection in the lady’s dressing room off the master bed chamber. Not even for Ross Montclaire was Annalise Avery going to put on one of those filmy, transparent bits of harlotry. Not the ostrich-feathered robe, either. Finally she went to the other dressing room and put on his robe, wrapping the maroon velvet nearly twice around her and cuffing up the sleeves.
She started down the front stairs, being careful not to trip, and then she did not have to worry at all, for she was in his arms, being carried down.
“Oh, Lord,” he breathed in her ear, “I have waited so long for this. I want you so badly.”
“I know, Gard,” she said from her place tucked against his chest on his lap on the sofa. “You’ve been so long without a—”
He shook her gently. “Little goosecap. Don’t you know the difference between wanting a woman, any woman, and wanting one woman so badly, no other will ever do?” When she shook her head, tickling his chin with her soft curls, he told her, “I’ll have to show you, then. Uh, just how much do you know about men anyway?”
“Only what I’ve learned from you this past few weeks.”
“Then you and Barny didn’t…?”
“Of course not!” she proclaimed, which statement required another lengthy embrace, one that left her robe partly open and his shirt partially unbuttoned. Annalise had finally gotten to feel those dark curls on his chest.
Breathing heavily, Gard asked, “Will you come upstairs with me?” The sofa pillows were slipping around, and he could only picture that virgin bed upstairs, with his virgin bride lying beside him. She wasn’t his bride yet, his conscience told him, but his baser self answered that she would be soon enough, and with her swollen lips and dreamy eyes, she’d follow him anywhere.
But what if she regretted it later? the inner debate went on. She deserved a little torment for his suffering, was the reply. Annie, his precious Annie? Gard sighed and compromised. Very well, he’d take her upstairs, where he could touch her, look at her, feel her warmth against his skin—and that was all. Perhaps he might sweeten his retaliation by bringing her to the brink of passion, then telling her he was too noble to continue. After all, he was no rutting beast, no adolescent. He could hold her soft, luscious body in his arms and still keep control of his own passion.
And for his next act he’d hold back the sun.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
While Annalise and Lord Gardiner were so pleasurably involved, Sir Vernon, from his carriage parked across the street, was pleasurably watching the candles go out one by one. First his minion came around to report that the lights were out in the kitchen and the rooms below stairs. Stavely returned in an hour to report a candle to the rear of the ground floor, which was extinguished shortly thereafter. Finally the front parlor grew dark except for the fainter glow of a dying fire, and lights bloomed upstairs. Sir Vernon told his dark-clad assistant to wait half an hour, then get busy. The smarmy footman gathered his equipment and silently crept away, eager to exact retribution for being duped so badly, even more eager to earn Sir Vernon’s gold.
The baronet was willing to pay whatever it took to get rid of his little problem—tonight. By tomorrow the interfering earl could present the girl to the
ton
, as the ordinary, well-behaved female she was, not a raving lunatic. Worse, he could marry the chit.
The haut monde—and the authorities—might conclude that the missing heiress was indeed the veiled horsewoman he finally heard about from Stavely, but they might never realize she was also a lowly servant. So if the housekeeper met an unfortunate end, one, moreover, that left her body unidentifiable, then to all intents and purposes Thompson’s ward was still alive, just waiting to be returned to the bosom of her loving family. And he’d have at least four more years to milk her estate, especially if Lord Gardiner and those Hennipicker people also perished. Sir Vernon filed his nails while he waited.
*
It was a kiss to make every other kiss feel like an uncle’s. It was the Marco Polo of kisses, going where no kiss had gone, opening worlds of wonder. It heated their bodies and clouded their minds, ringing bells in both their ears. And they hadn’t gone past the bedroom door.
Bells? his lordship thought. Bells? It was a fine kiss indeed, but bells? Then he heard a dog barking and someone calling “Fire!”
“Blast it, Annie, if this is another of your tricks, I’ll—”
“No, Gard, I swear!”
They both realized the room really was warm, not just their bodies overheating, and their minds were not fogged at all, they were full of smoke. Annie started to cough. Gard pulled a blanket from the mattress to beat at the flames if necessary, giving the still-chaste bed only one melancholy glance. Annie ran to the washstand and poured a pitcherful of water over them both before they dashed down the stairs. The earl had to steady her frequently, as she lost her footing in the trailing robe.
The front hall was engulfed in fire, so they made for the rear stairs and the back door.
“You go make sure Henny and Rob are out,” Annie called, shoving him down the first few steps while she ran back to her own room to gather her jewels and her reticule and her riding habit.
“You fool,” Gard shouted, wrenching the stuff from her and dragging her out. “As if I’d leave you!”
“But Henny and Robb?”
“Are already out. I heard them shouting. Now, come before they try to get back in to save you!”
But the kitchen door was also in flames; there was no exit that way. Annalise managed to grasp the mouse cage before Gard hauled her along after him upstairs again, where the fire was starting to travel along the hall carpet, licking up at the wood paneling and the wallpaper.
“Damnation!” Gard swore, not releasing his hold on Annie’s wrist. He made for the smaller parlor before the flames could reach the draperies, and shoved Annie facedown onto the love seat. “Stay there!” he ordered while he searched around the room for a fireplace poker, a chair, a heavy stool to throw against the window.
“Why don’t you just unlock it?” Annie demanded from his side, suiting action to word before Gard nudged her aside and threw the window open, then jumped down, holding his hands out for her. First she passed down the mouse cage while he swore. Then she retrieved her jewel box and reticule and riding habit from where he’d tossed them.
“For heaven’s sake, woman, you are taking years off my life with every second’s delay! Get yourself out here
now!
”
Annalise looked down at him, with soot on his face and his shirt open and untucked, appearing more like a buccaneer than ever. “I do not like it when you shout at me that way, my lord.”
“My God, Annie, do not get on your high horse now. Please don’t torture me this way!”
She read the anguish in his eyes and sighed contentedly as she jumped into his arms. “You really do care.”
*
The fire brigade managed to save some of the house, but not from smoke and water damage, naturally. The Watch declared the fire suspicious. How could they not, when it arose in two separate locations at the same time? None of the neighbors saw anyone lurking about. In fact, no one saw or heard anything until the dog’s barking awoke the neighborhood again after the pistol shot. Clyde was the hero of the hour and Henny the heroine for making Rob sleep in the stable, where he could hear the little terrier and alert everyone before they were overcome by the smoke. Annalise, Rob, and Henny were still hugging one another and Clyde when the fire engines rolled away. The earl came in for his fair share of exuberant affection, too, although Rob merely shook his hand.