The Blue Devil (The Regency Matchmaker Series) (11 page)

CHAPTER NINE

N
IGEL LOOKED DOWN
at the girl and sighed.

Jane’s bow mouth made a little O, and then she laughed. “I see the rumors are true. The young ladies really do swoon at the Marquis of Blackshire’s feet!”

“Rubbish.” Nigel snarled. “This one isn’t old enough to spell ‘marquis,’ much less swoon at the mention of one. And what rumors? Who have you been listening to this time? No,” he said irritably, holding up his palm, “on second thought, I don’t wish to know.”

He sighed again. He really was in a foul mood. It had been gathering like a storm cloud all week, and the closer it got to his birthday, the darker his mood became. He wished he could simply do away with the entire day, the entire week. Hell and blast, the entire month! He longed to ensconce himself in his library with a case of brandy while the occasion passed with him insensate, as he had each year before Jane had come to live in his care. But he wouldn’t have had that luxury this year, even if she’d not been his responsibility. Not with this damnable investigation ongoing and his country in peril, if Sir Winston were right—which he always was.

Nigel knelt and scooped the child from the floor. She was light as thistledown floating on a breeze. Cradling her still form in his arms, he looked down to examine her. When she had fallen, she had luckily managed to avoid both a thump on the head from the sharp-edged table. After satisfying himself that the girl was unharmed, he carried her to the salon across from the library, Jane scurrying ahead and rushing over to a ridiculously overstuffed divan, which she began to divest of pillows.

As she worked, Nigel cast his gaze over her little Kitty Davidson. Smooth skin curved flawlessly over high cheekbones and a rounded face. Short, dark eyelashes dusted her ivory complexion. A large, faded blue satin ribbon, tied in a bow, nestled in her tight blond curls. Her feet, peeking from under a blue skirt edged in faded yellow lace, were bare. He looked at her face once more. There was something of the familiar there . . . did he know her? Was he acquainted with her parents, perhaps?

She was not from a well-to-do family, judging by the condition of her clothing. But Nigel counted as friends people from many stations of life. He paid little attention to class distinction.

“How old is your Miss Davidson, Jane?”

“I’m not certain. Lady Marchman said we are almost of an age—which I took to mean either fourteen or sixteen.”

“Sixteen? I think fourteen more likely.” He looked again at the little-girlish cut of her ill-fitting dress and a wave of sympathy washed over him. The fabric, though clean, was worn and shabby, and it was plain to see the garments were old. How long had this young lady been without new clothes? He did a quick mental calculation. How could her parents afford to send her to school if they could not afford a new gown more than once every three or four years?

Poor girl.

He looked down at her lovely face and imagined what she would look like properly gowned. She was a comely lass, even at fourteen. Given a few years, she’d be able to charm the feathers from a chicken.

Or a marriage proposal from a bishop.

She probably already had the lads of whatever village she came from coming to blows for the privilege of carrying her over the threshold. She’d soon be marriageable, after all. Perhaps that was why her parents had sent her off to school. Perhaps they hoped that with an education to accompany her beauty, she might marry well. She’d need both, with no dowry to offer. And those horrendous clothes! Nigel hoped her parents would be able to do something about that problem.

He stood gazing down at her cherubic moppet face. Her eyelids were twitching, and for a moment he wondered if she were shamming, but he dismissed the notion. She had no reason for a false swoon. She was just coming to, that was all.

He noticed a deep, mended rip at the shoulder of her dress. “This garment ought to be ripped off and tossed,” he muttered, pinching the thin fabric of her sleeve and giving a little tug.

Suddenly, the cherub’s eyes jarred open, and she began to squirm and wriggle to be let down. Nigel’s eyes grew wide as he suddenly discovered parts of her were surprisingly rounded in a most
un
-cherubic way! Perhaps she
was
sixteen!

“Unhand me at once!” she demanded. “You shan’t have a stitch of my clothing, and if you rip the fabric, I shall tell the Times or the Bow Street Runners or . . . or both!” She scowled at him.

Nigel drew his head back in shock. “
What
?! What makes you think I want to—”
Oh
. Hadn’t he just grumbled something about getting rid of her clothing? He laughed. “No, I assure you that is not what I—”

“How dare you laugh! Put me down. Now, I say!”

But instead of setting her on her feet, Nigel just held on to her and smiled. He was a master of smiles. He bestowed them to disarm, tame, charm, or seduce. They were always calculated, created purposefully and executed without any accompanying mirth of heart to cloud his judgment. But not this one. It had come about on its own. It had no purpose, no reason for existing, but Nigel could no more have stopped its coming than he could have stopped breathing. Miss Davidson was a hellion. A perfect match for Jane!

His expression seemed to infuriate her, for she frowned and struggled even harder to be free of him.

Nigel’s grin widened. And he knew exactly why. In all of his days, even before inheriting, no lady, young or old, had ever struggled to be free of his touch. Yet Miss Davidson was struggling. Struggling and growling, the little hellcat. He couldn’t help chuckling.

“Put me down!” she sputtered.

“But you are recovering from a swoon,” Nigel told her.

“I am not!” She sounded outraged at the very idea.

“Oh. I do beg your pardon. But it certainly looks as though you are recovering,” Nigel said, pointedly eyeing her pinching fingers and stabbing knees.

Instantly, she stilled and tossed her head, eyes flashing. “Put me down.
Please
.”

Obeying a sudden impulse to provoke her, Nigel said, “You are weak. In fact, I think I should not allow you to recuperate from your swoon here in the library.”

“Allow?
Allow
!” she sputtered. “
You
will not allow?”

“Where is your chamber? I will take you to your bed.”

“The devil you will!” she cried. Quick as a ferret down a rabbit hole, the cherub-turned-hellcat reached up and yanked a lock of Nigel’s hair. Since she was evidently quite recovered—and since he was standing conveniently over the plump divan—Nigel dropped her.

She landed on her bottom, glared at him, and swung her feet to the floor, then raised a triumphant blond eyebrow. “Ah, it seems you are correct,” she said while primly arranging her skirts. “I must be weak after all”—she slid him a sly look—”for I could not pull your hair as hard as I wanted to.”

Nigel should have been furious. Instead he found himself . . . exhilarated. Challenged. He realized she had swooned before Jane had announced his title. Nigel was glad. He wondered how she’d react when she heard the word “marquis.” Would her delightful indignation metamorphose into the predatory speculation and corresponding speculative greed he was all too used to seeing in young ladies’ eyes? He hoped not. He was enjoying her enmity too much!

“Miss Davidson,” he said, grinning once more, “since you do not seem the type who makes a habit of swooning, I am truly concerned. So, like it or not, I intend to carry you upstairs to your chamber—with Jane accompanying us, of course. If you move to harm me again, I shall bind your hands and feet for the journey.”

“And will you gag me as well?”

“No. Your spiteful tongue amuses me.”

Miss Davidson stubbornly crossed her arms and, clamping her jaws tight, looked away.

“That amuses me, too,” he told her and was rewarded with a flash of irritation in her eyes. “Jane,” he directed his ward, “go have hot water sent up to your chamber. Also go upstairs and see that Miss Davidson’s night rail is ready and her bed turned down. Then come back here.” He looked around. Jane was standing, stock-still, staring at the two of them, a bemused expression on her face. He coughed and tossed his head in the direction of the hall, and for once she followed his orders without question, turned, and left. Nigel sat on a delicate Chippendale chair and, leaning back, tried to make it clear that he was going to stay long enough to see his orders carried out. Though Miss Davidson refused to look his way, he saw her red lips thin into a line at the sides.

She was enraged.

He was delighted.

In spite of the perverse satisfaction he was getting from rubbing the hellcat’s fur the wrong way, his cause was actually noble. It was not wise to ignore a genuine swoon, and Nigel knew it had to have been genuine, for Miss Davidson had certainly not been attempting to impress him with the delicacy of her feminine sensibilities. On the contrary, he had the distinct impression she would cheerfully do him another injury if she could--not that he could blame her. She’d come to in the arms of a strange man just in time to hear him say he wanted to divest her of her clothes! Poor thing!

Miss Davidson looked to be in fine fettle now, but a sudden faint could be a sign of all sorts of maladies, and the girl should have the attention of a doctor. Lady Marchman was due back in less than one hour. He would guard the stubborn Miss Davidson to make sure she stayed in bed, and then he would inform Lady Marchman of the incident. Chances were, he was wrong about her. Chances were Miss Davidson was simply a swooner, the sort who could be sent into a genuine cold fall at the mere glimpse of a garden frog or rearing horse. There were many like her in London, Nigel thought. She was not unique. He’d wager her anger would disappear magically at the mention of his title, too. She’d be fawning over him in seconds, just like all the rest. Irritation stabbed him, and Nigel looked away from her.

“Where is Jane?” he muttered. She was probably off poking into some dark recess of Lady Marchman’s boudoir, going against his express orders. She was always doing exactly the opposite of what she was told. “Devil take her, the rotten wench, she—” Nigel stopped abruptly, for Miss Davidson was staring at him openly. He shut his mouth and smiled at her. Her gaze snapped back to the window, and he returned to his brooding, though his ire was no longer directed toward Jane but inward, toward himself. What was the matter with him? Such an outburst was inexcusable.

He knew exactly what the matter was.

His birthday. It was almost upon him. In a few days, it would engulf him like a flood tide, drowning him in horrible memory, and nothing could stop it.

It stole his concentration every year, something he could not afford right now, not with the Marchman case breathing down his neck. Yet he had a right to be on edge, he told himself.

He shook his head at the delicate silhouette of Kitty Davidson. But for her presence, he could have put this unexpected boon of time in the empty school to use. Maybe the stolen war plans were here in the house, waiting for Lady Marchman’s accomplice to arrive and take them on to France. This would have been a good opportunity to search for them.

Blast! He wasn’t going to let a bad-tempered country chit get in the way of his duty. He’d lock her in her chamber if he had to, with Jane to guard her.

And where was Jane, anyway?

Nigel sat, trying to think about his mission, about where—and for what—he would look first, but he was very distracted by Miss Davidson, who was fidgeting with the golden fringe on the couch, twirling her delicate fingers around and around. Pulling, tapping, brushing under the tips of the fringe. Her fingers were long and surprisingly mature. He wondered if she liked the pianoforte or if she hated it and neglected her lessons. That would be a pity, for her passionate nature would give her music a depth of feeling so often lacking in the efforts of the other London chits. The strains of a Mozart concerto thrummed though his imagination, and Nigel sat, momentarily entranced by the movements of her hands. So precise . . . yet feather-soft, like those of a dancer. Suddenly, Nigel looked away. Jane was taking an awfully long time.

Miss Davidson was peering between the heavy velvet drapery, which nearly blocked the weak light that shone through the tall, narrow, divan window. Most of the windows in the house, Nigel noted, were similarly shrouded. The better to obscure the truth. He wondered if it were Lady Marchman’s guilty conscience or a fear of the gallows which drove her to keep the house dark. Perhaps the room would soon be light again. Lady Marchman had mentioned a school outing to view the magnificent glass window at St. Margaret’s Church and the architecture at St. Dunstan’s-in-the-West, to be held two days hence. If he found nothing before then, he would search the house during the St. Dunstan’s outing. Nigel’s thoughts drew him on an intense study of the room. He scanned it, looking for possible hiding places for the war plans--though it was unlikely Lady Marchman would hide them in a common room. They’d likely be in her bedchamber, if she had them at all.

“Do pictures and bud vases displease you particularly? Or do you always scowl?” Miss Davidson asked after a time, in tones that were not of the drawing-room variety.

“I do not scowl.”

“You are scowling at me right now.”

Was he? He had not been aware of it. “I do apologize. Young ladies as beautiful as yourself deserve nothing but smiles.” He expected her face to soften for his compliment, but he was disappointed.

Her eyes sparked with ire once more, and she crossed her arms and looked away. “You waste your smiles on me, then.”

“Not at all, for you are beautiful. A fair blossom, just beginning to open.” One with thorns, Nigel thought.

“You insist I am a flower? Then I am a briar rose,” she said smugly, echoing his thoughts.

“Exactly,” Nigel said, without hesitation.

For a fleeting moment, Miss Davidson’s eyes danced, and the corners of her well-shaped mouth twitched upward. The almost-smile transformed her face, and in that moment Nigel thought he glimpsed what the briar rose would look like in full bloom. Her hard frown quickly returned, but Nigel let the beauty of her smile’s image pool and eddy in his mind along with the other memory he carried of her smooth, sleeping face.

“You don’t frown often,” he said.

“I frown all of the time. Do not think you are getting special treatment just because I frown at you this—why are you laughing?”

“Because, cherub, your face has no frown lines. In fact, what you have is a set of laugh lines. You must be a happy girl by nature. I wish you would believe I did not truly mean to divest you of your clothing.”

“Cherub?” she asked archly. High color suffused her cheeks. He watched it spread in fascination. He’d pricked her ego. Her diminutive size must be a sore spot with her.

Nigel hid a grin. He stood and bowed low. “Forgive me, Miss Davidson. I did not mean to say ‘cherub.’”

“That’s better!”