The Care and Taming of a Rogue (14 page)

“What was your childhood like? Were you always adventurous?”

“Going back that far, are we?”

“Bennett, you gave your word.”

He hadn’t, not precisely, but it was close enough, he supposed. “My mother died when I was nine years old. My father was an army major who went to India without bothering to take his family with him. He died…well, I’m not certain when he died. I hadn’t seen him since I was six. So if you’re asking whether I went hunting for toads and beetles, no, I don’t recall that I did.”

“I’m so sorry,” she breathed, laying a hand on his arm. “Do you have any siblings?”

Bennett shook his head, doing his best not to drive the phaeton into a ditch at her soft, concerned touch. “Just me.”

“What about your uncle? Lord Fennington wrote very warmly about you in that book’s foreword. Did you live with him?”

With a snort, Bennett detoured them around a barouche full of bonnets and parasols. “No. His sister married a career soldier. I believe he told her that she received precisely what she deserved.”

“Who raised you, then? Badgers?”

“You’ve guessed it.”

“Very amusing. You’re educated. I’ve read your books, remember?”

“I’d rather talk about you, Phillipa.”

She lifted her palm to lightly slap his arm. “This is my turn. And I’m going to be ruthless.”

“I’ll remember that when it’s my turn.”

Color touched her cheeks. “Come now. Who raised you?”

“I did.” He shrugged. “I had a small stipend thanks to my grandfather, the former Lord Fennington, and went from boarding school to boarding school to university, which is where I met Jack Clancy. Then I joined the army, and used my…agility with language to see most of Europe and then India, Istanbul, Egypt, and eastern Africa. I wrote the books to further fund my expeditions, found myself knighted and given a gift of a country estate by Prinny, applied to the Africa Association to sponsor an expedition to the Congo, and here I am.”

“I think you left out some things.”

He grinned briefly. “You’ve read my books. That’s where the rest of it is.”

“What about ladies?” she asked, looking down at her feet. “You’ve never married?”

“No.”

“Have you been in love?”

“That’s a work in progress.”

The blush of her cheeks deepened. “You shouldn’t say such things.”

The number of vehicles around them had shrunk considerably, and as Bennett spied a small stream to one side of the road he turned the phaeton onto the grass. Pulling up behind a large, low-limbed oak tree out of easy sight of the road, he held the reins out to Phillipa. “Hold these a moment, will you?”

She started to reach out, then pulled her hands back again. “I don’t know how to drive a carriage.”

“You don’t have to. Just pull on the ribbons until I tie the horse off to a tree.”

“But I don’t have a chaperone.”

A muscle beneath his left eye began to twitch. “I would like to chat with you, as you instructed, and I don’t want to drive into the shrubbery while doing it.”

Sighing, she took the reins from his hands and kept them taut. For a heartbeat Bennett watched, waiting to see what the bay would do with a different driver holding him. When the phaeton didn’t lurch into motion again, he jumped to the ground and secured the animal. Kero leapt onto a low-hanging branch and practically flew up into the top of the oak tree, where she promptly set a quartet of sparrows into flight.

“You can let go now,” Bennett said, moving up to her side of the phaeton.

Phillipa looked at him as he raised his hands to help her down from the high seat.
Oh, goodness
. How had all this happened? One of the men she most admired in the world, he wasn’t at all what she’d expected. He was forward, direct, disdained most of the niceties of polite society, and seemed to be infatuated with her. She scowled for a brief moment. No, not infatuated, because he was quite aware of all her faults. She’d told him about them. Absorbed was perhaps a better word. But the why of that continued to elude her.

With exaggerated care she draped the reins over the seat and stood. Perhaps if she kept talking she wouldn’t be able to consider how very nervous she was at being in his company, especially after his announcement of yesterday. Especially when he still seemed perfectly serious today about wooing her.

She held her breath when he settled his hands around her waist and lowered her to the ground. Bennett gazed into her eyes, then leaned down. “No,” she said, pushing out of his grip. “Rules, remember?”

“And steps,” he added, looking equal parts annoyed and amused.

“Yes. Precisely. So whatever we may wish to do, we have to proceed properly.”

“‘We’?” he repeated, taking her hand in his. “We wish a kiss then, do we?”

“Yes. But while you might not care about propriety or convention, I wish to know more about your goals and motivations before I allow you to lead me down the garden path, Captain Wolfe.”

“We’re not all the way back to that, are we?” He reached beneath the phaeton’s seat and lifted a small satchel. “Because I brought you a gift.”

“A leather bag?”

Bennett lifted an eyebrow. “I suppose you may have the bag, but I thought you’d be more interested in what’s inside it. Shall we?” He gestured to the pleasant-looking grassy bank beneath the scattered shade of the surrounding oak trees. Together with the gentle burble of the stream beside it, the setting was desperately romantic.

Phillipa clasped her hands behind her back. “Are you attempting to seduce me?”

“I told you that I was.” He sat on a fallen trunk, and gestured for her to join him there. It seemed far too close to him, given the way her heart was pounding, but for heaven’s sake. He wasn’t a lion. He wasn’t going to eat her.

“Well, it’s very pretty here. I’ll grant you that.”

“You know, the last time I sat this close to a riverbank, a crocodile tried to eat Langley. A shame I stopped it, now that I consider it.”

“You shouldn’t talk that way, Bennett. And you know that in the book it’s he who saves you.” She seated herself.

“Yes, I recall.” Bennett shifted a breath closer to her before he set the satchel on his lap and opened the flap. “One of the friendlier tribes traded this to me for a mirror,” he said, pulling out a small wooden carving and holding it out to her. “What do you make of it?”

She held out her hand, and he put it into her fingers. The squat figure was approximately the size of an ostrich egg, though the thick-looking fur, flat nose, and menacing teeth little resembled any kind of bird she’d ever seen. “It looks a bit like a chimpanzee,” she offered, “but not quite.”

“I thought the same thing. My housekeeper wrote me a rather nasty note about me terrorizing her after I had her open the crate and send it here to me.”

“Well, I’m not surprised. It’s rather frightening.” She turned it this way and that. “You never came across any animal that looked like this?”

Bennett shook his head, one dusky lock of hair falling across his eyes. “Nothing even close. Baboons were the largest monkey in the area.”

“Perhaps it’s a mythological creature.”

Frowning thoughtfully, he ran his finger along its spine, as though petting it. “About twenty-three hundred years ago,” he said, examining the creature’s flat, wide face, “the Carthaginian explorer Hanno wrote that he came across some very large, very hairy individuals on the West African coast. He called them ‘gorillae.’ This could be a rendering of one of them, I suppose.” He flashed her a grin. “Or it could be the result of an artist drinking too much fermented berry juice, and is actually a carving of his wife.”

“Mm hm.”

“At any rate, I thought it was interesting, and I thought you might find it the same. So there you are.”

She looked up at him. “You’re truly giving it to me?”

“I can’t think of any other female who would wish to touch it, much less be interested in its origins.”

Phillipa smiled, closing her hands around it. There might be nothing else like it in the world, and he’d given it to
her
. “Thank you, Bennett. It’s remarkable.”

“Remarkable and frightening.” With another short smile that sent her heart into dizzy loops, he reached into the satchel again. “And something a bit prettier, I think.”

He held a necklace in his hand. It couldn’t be anything else, with brightly painted wooden beads and shells interspersed with what looked like a trio of large claws. “I got this after a challenge where I had to knock the tribe’s chief warrior out of a dirt circle using nothing but a large stick. Which may not seem like much, but those damned things sting against bare skin.”

“Your skin was bare?” she asked, deciding at the same moment that Livi never would have asked that question.

“From head to toe. Part of the challenge.” He looked down at it. “The claws belong to a leopard, apparently killed by this warrior using the same kind of stick. I actually think a spear might have been involved, but he wouldn’t admit to it. Hence the fight in the dirt circle.”

“You argued with a warrior over how he killed a leopard.”

Bennett shrugged. “I killed a leopard, too, you know. Only I used a Baker rifle.” He held the necklace out to her. “It’s supposed to be protection against evil spirits. And it’s one of the prettiest pieces I’ve ever seen.”

She began to reach for it. She wanted it, not just because it was primitive and beautiful, but because he wanted her to have it. Phillipa set the carving aside and folded her hands in her lap. “You can’t give me jewelry.”

“It seems that I can.”

“There are two reasons why you can’t.”

He sighed. “I can hardly wait. Enlighten me.”

“First, you’re simply not thinking clearly. And when you do realize where a more advantageous match lies for someone in your position, you’ll want these things back. I don’t want to be embarrassed, and I don’t want my heart broken.”

“I’m not here to break your heart, Phillipa.” He set the necklace down across his knee, freeing his hand. He ran a finger along her cheek, making her shiver. “Though I am somewhat relieved that your heart is involved. Continue.”

Phillipa shook herself. After his touch, she’d nearly forgotten what she’d been saying. “Second, jewelry is too…personal a gift. There are r—”

“There are rules,” he interrupted, scowling. Before she could move, he had both her hands in his, their faces inches apart. “Don’t put me off, Phillipa. I’ve given you my one warning; I am after you. If you wish me to proceed your way, I will. To a point. But if you continue throwing up that damned—blasted—‘you can’t do that’ protest and still look at me with that same…passion in your eyes, I will put you back in that phaeton and not stop driving until we reach Gretna Green. Is that clear?”

She swallowed, her breath coming fast and shallow. Every muscle longed to tilt her face up just a little so their lips would touch. He was too direct, too confident, to fit in with his Mayfair peers. And that made him very appealing to her, whatever she might tell both him and herself.

“Do it, Phillipa,” he whispered. “Kiss me.”

Though she had the distinct feeling that she would regret it for the remainder of her life, she held where she was. “I won’t tell you what you can’t do,” she murmured back at him, her voice shaking, “but I will tell you what you should be doing. If you mean to…do this correctly. If you’re serious about…wooing me.”

“Don’t say that,” he returned in the same intimate tone. “It sounds silly.”

Phillipa cleared her throat at the soft, compelling sibilance. “Bennett.”

“I’ve been alone for a very long time, Phillipa, and I mean to marry you. That is how serious I am.”

She pulled away from him while she still had an ounce of sense left to her. “A woman likes to be pursued,” she began, realizing at that moment how very little she knew about the topic in which she’d decided to instruct him, “but not literally.”

“No chasing you down the street,” he agreed, a slow smile pulling at his sensuous mouth.

“Correct. Poetry, picnics, dances, drives—things that can be shared, but aren’t gifts. Then flowers, and then more intimate gifts like jewelry.”

“You fainted when I brought you flowers.”

“Not two dozen red roses, for heaven’s sake. Up until that moment, you’d called me a conundrum and made some comment about chasing me. Then just like that, red roses.”

“What is the least threatening flower, then?”

Phillipa scowled. “You’re teasing me.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “I said I would go along with the rules to a point. And nice as it was to carry you in my arms, I’d prefer that my future actions not cause you to faint.”

Apparently he meant to rush through the non gift-giving portion of the courtship. If he was truly serious, she actually didn’t mind all that much. “Daisies, then,” she decided. “White or yellow.”

“Daisies,” he repeated, reaching over to tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear.

As she shivered, he leaned in, replacing his fingers with his lips, brushing lightly along her temple. She kept still. If she protested, he would stop. If she continued to push him away, he might stop looking for other ways to pursue her, and then she truly would have accomplished the stupidest action in the history of stupid actions. If they didn’t suit, it should be because they’d found they weren’t compatible, and not because she was foolish.