“I never would have thought it,” Jeremy said wonderingly. “Maggie Herbert, a fainter
and
a slapper! How times have changed. I never thought
you’d
turn out to be such a delicate flower.”
That was all it took to bring Maggie out of her stupor. Lifting her head—she couldn’t believe she actually had to
lift her head
to look him in the eye—she snapped, “I’m no fainter. And I didn’t slap you, I elbowed you, and you deserved it. Now let go of my hand.”
Jeremy smiled, and she quickly looked away. His smile seemed to have the same devastating effect on her heart as his eyes. They both made it do some kind of flip inside her chest. “Same old Mags,” he said, lifting her fingers to his lips in hearty tribute. “Despite the fresh new curves.”
Maggie, horrified at both the casual reference to her bosom and the way his eyes so carefully gauged her reaction as his lips caressed her knuckles, immediately and ineffectually tried to pull her hand away. But Jeremy, a knowing smirk spreading across his face, kept hold of her fingers, and even flipped them over, to study her nails.
“Ah,” he said. “Vermilion, magenta, and a bit of … what’s that, now? Oh, yes, flake white. I see we’re still painting. And how
are
Dame Ashforth’s cats? She must have enough portraits of them by now to fill the Great Hall—”
“Let go of my hand.” Maggie tried to keep her voice steady, but it wasn’t easy, since she was a few seconds away from panicking. “I mean it, Jerry. Let go!”
“‘Let go of my hand,’” Jeremy mimicked. “‘Get off me.’ What sort of way is that to greet an old friend, one you haven’t seen in half a decade?”
That distracted her, and she quit pulling so frantically on her fingers. “Friend?” Maggie echoed. Then she gave a snort. “Since when were
we
ever friends? Enemies would be more like it.”
“You were the one who harbored all the adversarial feelings,” Jeremy said, mockly hurt. “I never understood why. You lived to make my life a misery, when all I ever wanted to do was—”
“All you ever wanted to do was lord it over everybody,” she interrupted. It was her turn to mimic. “
‘You
can’t be the pirate captain, Maggie. I’m the duke, / get to be the pirate captain.
You
can’t have the last cherry popover, Maggie. I’m the duke,
I
get the last cherry popover. You have to do as I say, Maggie, because I’m the—’”
“So what?” Jeremy cut her off, managing to look supremely unconcerned. “It’s not as if you ever did what I told you anyway.”
“Good thing
somebody
wouldn’t let you browbreat
them,” Maggie pointed out. “Or you might have grown up to be a nasty sort of man who wouldn’t let go of girls’ hands when they asked you to.”
“Nasty? So I’m nasty, am I?” He grinned, seeming to like the sound of that, though Maggie had hardly meant it as a compliment. But he dropped her hand anyway, and stood looking down at her, a bit speculatively, Maggie thought. She wondered what he was thinking, and then defensively folded her arms across her chest. So he liked her new figure, did he? And had the audacity to admit it, to her face! Lord, how her sister Anne would have fainted if she’d overheard
that
conversation!
Maggie’s sister would have done more than faint if she could have been privy to Jeremy’s thoughts just then. He was mentally kicking himself for not having attempted to seduce Sir Arthur Herbert’s youngest daughter years before. How could he not have seen it? he asked himself. How could he not have known she’d turn into such a delectable morsel? True, none of her sisters had been anything much, so he hadn’t had a lot of warning, but Maggie … What a find! He’d never had this much fun with a girl he hadn’t paid for. There was something about her, something in that uninhibited impertinence of hers, that hinted that though the girl might only just be out of the schoolroom, there wasn’t a bit of schoolroom in the girl. It looked as though his visit home might just turn out not to be such a bore after all … .
For Maggie’s part, she was not liking this turn of events. Not liking it at all. There weren’t a lot of people Maggie saw on a day-to-day basis who were bigger than she was, and so she wasn’t used to being made to feel small, but Jeremy, whom she’d pretty much bullied for years, now had the advantage of being able to make her feel so. Worse, he was so much bigger that he actually made her feel a little afraid. And the last thing Maggie liked to feel was afraid. She considered herself fearless, having—unlike her elder sisters—aversions to neither heights nor water, mice nor insects, enclosed spaces nor the dark. How she could possibly be afraid of Jeremy Rawlings, she wasn’t certain, but the trepidation was there, all right, and she was going to have to
do something about it, or admit to herself that there was one thing she feared … but whether that thing was Jeremy Rawlings, or how he made her feel, she wasn’t sure.
Risking a glance toward Jeremy’s face, she saw that he was still looking down at her, and still wearing the same thoughtful expression. Lord, he was attractive! How could she not have noticed that before? Not that she liked good-looking men … well, except for Lord Edward, and Alistair Cartwright, her brother-in-law. But in general, Maggie thought handsome men tended to think entirely too well of themselves. She supposed Jeremy had a reason to feel superior, since he’d turned out to be good-looking, and had more money than the queen, as well. But in his case, both his looks and his money were gifts of fortune. Only a fool took pride in gifts from God … .
Then Maggie’s gaze strayed past his broad shoulders. “Uh, Jeremy,” she said.
“Yes?” Both of his eyebrows lifted expectantly.
“You might want to catch your horse. He’s running away.”
Startled, Jeremy turned around to see King trotting off toward the south pasture, where the fillies were grazing.
“Hell,” Jeremy swore. He turned quickly back to Maggie. “Stay here,” he said, making a gesture rather like Yorkshire shepherds made to their collies when they wanted them to stay in one place. “All right? I’ll be right back.”
“Oh,” Maggie said, nodding seriously. “Of course.”
The minute his back was turned, however, she started heading toward the house … not running, exactly, because that was hard to do while holding the bodice of one’s dress closed—and besides, she didn’t want him to think she was running
away
—but walking very briskly. Retreat seemed the best strategy at that point. She needed to make repairs to more than just her dress … her mind was in a veritable whirl, after having been bombarded with so many new sensations at once. Jeremy Rawlings, looking just as manly and strong as the local blacksmith’s sons, whom she’d been admiring from afar for well over a year now? Jeremy Rawlings, looking down at her with lust in his eyes, eyes she’d once
thought dull, but which now shone as brightly as her mother’s silver tea service? Jeremy Rawlings,
taller than she was
?
What was her world coming to?
It was too much for a girl like Maggie to assimilate all at once. Used to quiet country living, she wasn’t at all sure how to react to this new turn of events. She needed time for reflection, time to pull herself together—both literally and figuratively—time to figure Out how best to beat this new and disturbing discovery: She was afraid of Jeremy Rawlings.
She never had a chance. She’d hardly made it past the turnaround in front of the rambling, three-storied manor house, before she heard a deep voice—Lord, even his voice had changed!—call her name. Damn! Maggie stopped dead in her tracks, looked heavenward for strength, then slowly pivoted toward him.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Jeremy’s voice, though deep, had a note of amusement in it that Maggie recognized. It was the same tone in which he’d often addressed her, shortly after suffering through one of her innumerable pranks.
“Uh,” Maggie said. “Nowhere. Inside. To find a button.” Mentally, she kicked herself. Oh, brilliant conversation, Maggie!
“Come with me,” Jeremy said. He had caught King, and now stood panting from the exertion and looking, in Maggie’s opinion, far too handsome, with the sun bringing out blue highlights in his jet-black hair—he’d apparently lost his hat in their tumble—and his cravat untied just enough to reveal a few dark curls of chest hair at the base of his throat.
“Uh,” Maggie said. Again, she was having trouble with her tongue. Normally, she couldn’t keep it still, but today, it was as heavy as a brick inside her mouth. “No. I can’t. I’ve really got to—”
“Just come with me while I get this beast safely stabled away.” He was grinning down at her as if her reluctance were one of the funniest things he’d ever seen. “Then we’ll go inside and find you a button. Come on.”
“I really can’t, Jeremy. My mother—”
“Oh, dash your mother.” The silver eyes flashed challengingly, as the grin on his face grew wider. “What are you afraid of?”
Maggie froze. “Nothing,” she said, too quickly. Nothing wrong with her tongue anymore.
The silver eyes glinted. “You wouldn’t be afraid of me, now would you, Mags?”
“Certainly not!”
“Are you lying to me, Mags?”
“No …”
The grin turned into a smile so wide that she could see all of his white, even teeth. “No, of course not. I didn’t think so. So come on.” He turned to present her with the crook of his free arm. “Walk with me. I want to hear all about how you’ve been keeping yourself these past five years. You’re still painting, obviously. But what else have you been doing?”
Maggie cast one last, longing glance at the large double doors of the manor house. Beyond them lay safety, sanity, and a maid with a sewing kit. But Maggie had never been able to abide cowardice, least of all in herself. So, sighing, she crossed the drive and slipped a hand through the crook of Jeremy’s elbow.
“Oh,” she said, breezily. “Not much.”
It had been too easy. All it had taken was a goad at her pride, and she was his. Well, not really his … not yet, anyway. But he’d managed to discover her weakness—or rather, rediscover it, since he remembered now, quite clearly, that Maggie could always be coerced into doing just about anything by one simple sentence: You’re not afraid, are you, Mags?
She was doing a very good job of looking unafraid, supremely unafraid, at the moment, perched on a bale of hay just outside of King’s stall, her feet swinging above the floor as she leaned back against a wooden post. Unfortunately, she still kept one hand clenched around the front of her bodice, depriving him of another glimpse of the curves of those pale beauties. He didn’t think it would be long, however, before he got to do more than just look at them. Now that he knew what to say to get a rise out of her, he had no doubt that soon, very soon, he’d finally be getting revenge on Maggie Herbert for all those tricks she’d played on him in their childhood … .
But in the meantime he was content to just look at her, since she looked very nice indeed, sitting amidst all the slanting rays of sunshine that spilled through the open stall doors, her long hair loose and soft-looking, shimmering down her back. It was good luck he’d managed to coordinate his homecoming with teatime. All of the grooms and stablehands were indoors, enjoying some of Cook’s famous seed cake. He and
Maggie were alone in the stables, except for the horses, and a few birds that had built nests in the rafters, and twittered irritatedly at them for invading their privacy.
Maggie, for her part, was feeling more at ease. Jeremy had toned down the lusty glances to such a degree that she was beginning to think perhaps she’d been mistaken about them. After all, the Duke of Rawlings could have any woman in the world. Why would he want
her
? She was just the daughter of his solicitor, a knight who lived a few estates away. Her sister had happened to marry his uncle’s best friend, and her mother was very fond of his aunt, and so they’d been thrown together quite a bit as children, but that was all. Surely all of this marked friendliness of his was just for old time’s sake. He couldn’t possibly see her as anything else but an old friend. This reminder went a long way toward soothing her somewhat jumbled nerves.
“So,” she was saying, as he went about the business of unsaddling King, “Evers senior is still here at Rawlings Manor, while his son is at the town house in London, and
his
son, if I understand correctly, is attending some kind of butlery school, in hopes that his grandfather will retire someday soon, and he can take over the post. Only according to your aunt, Evers senior says he’ll retire when he’s dead, and he still insists upon doing all the decanting himself, even though his hands shake terribly whenever he picks up anything heavier than a fingerbowl.”
Jeremy, who’d removed his coat while he brushed out his horse, now thought he might as well take off his cravat, and he tried to do so casually, laying the simple piece of linen over the coat he’d thrown across the stall door.
“Really,” he said, bending down to give King’s forelocks a good rub.
“Yes. And your aunt’s maid Lucy had another baby girl, and that makes four, but she says she won’t be happy until she has a boy, though you’d think four girls would be enough, for God’s sake.”
“I see,” Jeremy said. He straightened, and threw the brush aside, fixing Maggie with a stare she couldn’t see,
since the sun was full on her face, and his back was to the light.
“And Mrs. Praehurst is turning sixty-five next fall,” she went on, happily filling him in on the details of the private lives of his servants, “and your aunt and uncle are sending her on a trip to Italy, but Mrs. Praehurst hates Italians, and says that cuisine that depends so heavily on the tomato can’t be good for the digestion, so somebody ought to warn them—”
“Maggie,” Jeremy said. Something in his voice warned her that he wasn’t interrupting her because he had a question about his housekeeper’s attitude toward Mediterranean cooking. He had opened the stall door and then shut it again behind him, and now stood just a few feet away from the hay bale upon which she sat. She couldn’t read his expression at all, but she supposed, from the way his voice had sounded, that it wasn’t particularly composed.
“Ye-es?” she said slowly.
But when he stepped close enough for his shadow to fall over her face, she was able—though she had to crane her neck to do so—to see that he didn’t look nervous or upset at all. In fact, he looked downright teasing.
“You’ve told me everything about everybody remotely connected to Rawlings Manor,” he said, sitting down beside her on the hay bale, without so much as a by-your-leave. “But you haven’t said a word about yourself.”
Maggie, because he’d sat so close to her that their shoulders brushed—well, her shoulder brushed up against his upper arm—moved over a little, to give him more room. “Well, there isn’t much to tell,” she said dryly. “I’ve been at school.”
“Yes, of course,” he said. Was it her imagination, or had he moved closer the second she scooted away? “But what now?”
“Well,” she said, moving away again. “I don’t know. I wanted to study painting in Paris, but my father won’t let me.”
“Oh?” Did he have to sound so pleased about that? And how had she ended up on the very edge of the hay bale all
of a sudden, with nowhere else to go but the floor?
“So what will you do instead?”
“I don’t know,” Maggie said, glancing down at the floor. It wasn’t that she was nervous, exactly, because he was sitting so close; it was just that she couldn’t figure out why he was doing it. The floor looked preferable, she thought, to his lap, which was where she was going to end up if he moved much closer. Maybe if she kept on talking, she could keep him distracted. “I suppose I’ll just have to go to London, you know, for my coming out—”
“Oh, your coming out,” Jeremy echoed. He lifted an arm and draped it across her shoulders. Maggie stared at his hand as it dangled off to her left, and saw, with some alarm, that there were black hairs, not unlike the ones at the opening of his shirt, all over his arm where it jutted out from the shirt cuff he’d rolled up. There was something so distinctly masculine about the coarseness of those hairs that Maggie felt a spurt of anxiety simply by looking at them.
“And are you looking forward to coming out, Mags?” he asked.
“Not particularly,” Maggie replied. She turned her head until she was looking into his eyes, which wasn’t difficult, since his face hung just inches from hers. But that turned out to be something of a mistake, since his eyes still seemed to have a strange sort of effect on her—only now, instead of her heart flipping over, gooseflesh sprung up on her bare arms, even though she was sitting in direct sunlight and was actually feeling quite warm. “The whole thing seems rather stupid to me,” she managed to say. Her tongue had gone curiously dead again. “I hate parties, and I don’t like to dance—” She saw his gaze drop. “Jeremy,” she said, a spurt of anxiety once again shooting through her. “Why are you staring at my mouth?”
He smiled, and the hand that had been hanging over her left shouder curled around it, enfolding her in a sort of half-embrace. “Because I’m going to kiss you, Mags,” he said, in a voice so soft it was a caress in itself. “Don’t you want me to?”
Now
Maggie’s heart began some strenuous activity, turning
over sickeningly inside her chest. “Not particularly,” she said, quickly leaning back—right into his waiting arm. Realizing she’d been caught as surely as a rabbit in a snare, she flung up both hands defensively, forgetting all about her missing button. “No—”
But it was too late. This wasn’t the Jeremy of five years earlier, whom she’d been able to bully at will. This was the new Jeremy, a full-grown man, a good deal bigger and stronger than she was, and who didn’t seem the least bit concerned about how she felt in the matter. Even as she protested, he lowered his mouth over hers … .
And then she could only wonder what all her fussing had been about. Because while it was strange—
exceedingly
strange—to be kissed by Jeremy, it was also actually quite pleasant.
Maggie had never been kissed by a man before. She’d never been held in a man’s arms, or even stood near enough to a man to know that everything about them—
everything
—was different. They didn’t feel the way women did—there was no hint of softness about them. They were hard all over. Every place Maggie laid her hands, she felt only hard muscle constricting. Even their skin wasn’t soft—Maggie felt the abrasion of Jeremy’s day-old growth of beard against her mouth. His whiskers were as sharp as nettles. And men didn’t even
smell
the way women did. Jeremy smelled of leather and horse and, faintly, of tobacco, all scents that, had they clung to Maggie, she’d have taken great pains to scrub away. But somehow, they seemed right coming from a man. Everything seemed right: The arm that he slid around her waist to pull her closer to him seemed right. The lips he moved over hers, in dozens of small, eager kisses, seemed right. Even the slow, seductive exploration of the inside of her mouth that his tongue embarked upon … even
that
seemed right.
What didn’t seem right, however, was the way these things were making Maggie
feel.
She ought, she knew, to be wildly angry with Jeremy for being so forward. She ought, she was certain, to be trying to push him away. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t summon up an ounce of indignation,
because the moment he’d started kissing her, a delicious lethargy stole over her. With his body pressing hers back until she was supported only by his strong arms, and his mouth moving so hungrily over hers, she suddenly felt like the fragile, dainty kind of girl she’d always wanted to be. The kind of girl who really did need smelling salts, who wasn’t too tall for a man to lift easily and carry up a staircase … .
But that wasn’t all she felt. No, there was something entirely different going on beneath her underthings. Because while the rest of her body felt languorous and lovely, there was a distinct tightening sensation between her legs, and a sudden rush of moisture for which there was no conceivable explanation, except that, as Maggie had always feared would happen, her carnal inclinations had completely taken over.
Something
was certainly making her feel as purry as a cat in heat, and there was no denying the fact that as insistently as Jeremy was pressing his body against hers, she was pressing right back, to the point where certain parts of her actually
ached
because she longed for him to touch them … .
But when his free hand, which had been caressing the smooth bare skin of her upper arm as they kissed, dipped into the place where her bodice gaped open to fondle one of her heavy round breasts, she stiffened with surprise. That, she knew immediately, was
not
right. Not because it didn’t feel good—she didn’t think she’d ever felt anything quite as nice as his callused fingers moving almost worshipfully over her bare skin—but because it felt too good, so good, in fact, that Maggie had a pretty good idea that she might not be able to stop him at all if she didn’t stop him just then.
“Jerry,” she breathed, when his lips moved from hers to burn a path of kisses down the side of her throat.
“Mmmm.” The fingers he’d slipped beneath the bodice of her dress found the lace edging to her camisole, and slid beneath it to glide across her satiny skin. Maggie inhaled sharply.
“Jerry,” she said again, more urgently this time. “Stop—”
“Why?” He sounded genuinely curious, but he didn’t pause in his exploration of her breast. Discovering a hardened nipple, he flattened his palm against it, and gently began
to squeeze with his fingers, while pushing with his palm. This caused a sound to leave Maggie’s throat, a sound that, more than ever, reminded her of a cat in heat, as she arched her back instinctively against
his fingers
. She could feel the gusset of her drawers growing even slicker with moisture.
“Jeremy!” This time, there was no breathiness to her voice.
Jeremy’s voice in reply, however, was as lethargic as if he were drunk.
“What is it, Mags?” he asked, right before he pressed his lips to the top of the swollen curve of her breast.
Maggie’s hands went to his hair as she tried to prevent his head from dipping lower. She was surprised by how silky the ink-black curls felt against her fingers. “Jeremy,” she said. It was almost causing her physical pain to fight against the impulse to fling herself at him. “You’ve got to stop … .”
“I can’t,” he replied, into the cleft between her breasts. He was already raining kisses closer and closer to the nipple he’d palmed. “Oh, God, Maggie. When did all this happen?”
She blinked down at his dark head. “When did all what happen?” she asked confusedly.
“All this,” he said wonderingly, and moved his hand from one breast to the other, leaving the nipple he’d been massaging stiffly erect in the open air. Before Maggie had a chance to cover herself, however, Jeremy’s mouth performed that service for her, his lips closing over the hardened peak. A wave of heat coursed through her, and again a sound escaped Maggie, a helpless mew of desire.
This was awful, much worse than she’d orginally thought! Now she not only did not want him to stop, she had a physical
need
for him to continue … and yet what was going to happen if he did continue? If she was practically writhing beneath him when all he’d done was touch her nipple with his tongue, what was going to happen, God forbid, if he should lift up her skirts and …