The Rambunctious Lady Royston (12 page)

are all we've got left now. Maybe it's time we start to get to know one another. Who knows? We might even find we can tolerate each other."

"I'd like that, Grandmother," St. John replied earnestly, giving the old lady's hand a firm squeeze.

"Perhaps—perhaps I have been too hasty. Perhaps I should postpone my journey and stay on with you a few days," she mused mistily.

"Grandmother, unless you wish a total breach in our relationship, you will hie your carcass off posthaste," the Earl contradicted vigorously. "Madam, lest it has slipped your mind, I am in the midst of my honeymoon."

The dowager cackled, her humor and her vigor seemingly restored. "And a prime bit of fight and fire you chose for a bride. A monkey to a copper penny she'll have you at her feet on a leash before the year is out. I can tell you, Zachary, if I weren't so damned jealous of her beauty, youth and spirit, I could find it in my heart to really like that gel. She reminds me a bit of myself in my salad days."

"So that explains why I was so immediately drawn to the creature," Royston said with a wink, as he gifted his grandmother with a spontaneous rather than a dutiful kiss, admonished her to resist the temptation to order the coachman to spring the horses while still within the confines of the city (as was her custom), and waved the dowager on her way.

As the Earl was remounting the steps, Isabella and Aunt Loretta were just beginning their descent. The excitement of the morning had prompted Isabella to forego lunch in favor of a quiet meal at home, and she was in the act of soothing her aunt's distress over missing out on luncheon at an Earl's table.

"But, Isabella," her aunt complained, "I don't understand your haste. I could vow we have not stopped above a half-hour with Samantha, and her invitation did include luncheon. I distinctly remember it."

Royston suppressed a grin as he helped the ladies into their carriage, which had just pulled around front, and comforted Aunt Loretta somewhat by extending a dinner invitation for the following week. Isabella smiled her

thanks and Royston signaled the driver to move off, just as Aunt Loretta was innocently asking Isabella if anything exciting had happened while she had been taking her "little rest."

When St. John re-entered the main salon, it was to find his wife pacing the floor restlessly, her hands clenched into angry fists and her mouth moving in quiet fury.

"'Lend me her countenance,' she said," Samantha muttered angrily when she saw him. "As if I need to be taken under her wing, so she can parade me about at every insipid Venetian breakfast and choral concert in town, showing me off as her
protégée
—like a pet monkey. It's beyond everything wonderful that I was able to restrain myself from doing her grave bodily harm."

"Now, now, pet," the Earl reasoned shrewdly, "you succeeded in routing her quite beautifully, and without any loss of blood. Actually, Grandmother unbent sufficiently in the end to pay you some fulsome compliments, words of praise I hesitate to repeat else they turn your head."

Samantha allowed herself to be slightly mollified. "I thank her for her kind words, but that doesn't erase the fact that she is a particularly overbearing person."

Royston chuckled. "And you, of course, are full to overflowing with all the first-rate virtues. As a matter of fact, I always felt you put me in mind of someone—and at last I think I have placed the resemblance. Not physically, of course, but in many other ways you remind me a great deal of Grandmother before her grief for Robin turned her so bitter. No, no, infant," he laughingly pleaded, holding his hands in front of his face as Samantha looked about to deliver him a solid facer, "I mean that as a compliment, truly."

Shaking her head in disbelief Samantha asked, "How can you be so casual about it all? That woman stood right in this room not ten minutes past, and baldly accused you of murder. Aren't you the least bit angry? I vow I was so incensed for you I barely remember what I said to her."

While in the midst of removing an infinitesimal speck of lint from the sleeve of his coat, Royston answered quietly, "To be perfectly honest, I was about to give vent to a few thoughts of my own when, lo and behold, my wife gallantly stepped into the breach in my defense. If I have not thanked you before, I do so now."

Samantha was not satisfied. She was mystified by the depth of her outrage over the dowager's insulting remarks about her husband, and she was having great difficulty bringing her emotions under control. "But Zachary—" she began one more time—only to be cut off in mid-harangue by the bruising pressure of Zachary's lips against her half-open mouth.

She stood stock-still while his mouth softened and coaxed her own stiff lips into the first glimmerings of response. He had already placed his hands on her shoulders, and soon she felt her own hands moving with an independence she could but marvel at. Finally her nerveless fingers encountered and clutched at Zachary's muscular chest.

An involuntary moan escaped her when he at last drew away, to look down at her bemused face with what she considered to be an expression of insufferable smugness. She dropped her hands as if she had just encountered a hot coal, stepped rapidly back a pace or two, and charged indignantly: "And just what was that particular exercise meant to prove?"

St. John's answer was anything but soothing. He had kissed her, he said, because he was still feeling angry over the set-to with his grandmother.

"Well, that smacks of a singularly stupid brand of reasoning," Samantha railed back at him indignantly.

"Oh, I don't agree. As the kiss is now concluded and my anger is considerably abated, your insulting remark concerning my logic is quite superfluous. Events, my dear, speak for themselves."

"If that's so, then your logic is only half true. My anger is no less heated than before your vicious assault on my person," Samantha told him testily.

St. John stroked his chin, clucked his tongue, and commiserated, "That really is too bad. May I suggest we repeat the process, concentrating our efforts entirely in your direction?"

She backed up another pace. "Do, and I'll scream," she warned. "Carstairs may expire of a severe case of injured sensibilities, but let that be on your own head."

In answer the Earl shrugged, turned, and strolled towards the door. As he was about to pass through the doorway he hesitated and threw back over his shoulder, "It is a pity, actually. You have denied what could well have been an extremely interesting experiment. Do remember we're promised this evening to Lady Frazer, pet. I find myself looking forward to whatever ensemble you might be planning to dazzle the
ton
with, if that morning gown was meant to give me a hint as to your inventive sense of fashion."

Not appearing the least bit upset, he then quit the room, leaving behind a fuming Samantha who could not decide whether she was angry that he had kissed her at all or, perversely, even angrier that he had abandoned his second attempt so readily. Eventually, she decided it would be prudent not to delve too deeply into the matter and took herself off for her belated luncheon.

In the end, Lord and Lady Frazer were to be denied the presence of the St. Johns at their select little affair (no less than three hundred of their closest friends) that evening, thereby robbing Lady Frazer of the social coup of the Season. It was a sad deprivation for which her esteemed husband would pay dearly, in the form of numerous dressmaker's bills and other bouts of expensive recompense that would only serve to lower his dear wife's high flight of hysteria by a degree or two. Poor Lord Frazer.

But his tribulations paled in the face of the puzzle set before Royston when confronted with a message from Samantha, presented to him by the stammering maid, Daisy, informing him that Lady Royston was ill and already in bed with a warm brick at her toes.

"P-powerful ill, she be, too, m'lord," Daisy added loyally.

"My goodness," St. John returned in suitably concerned tones, although his attitude of relaxation—positioned as he was in a leather wing chair, one leg crossed negligently over his other knee, his hands facing each other, splayed fingertips touching—seemed oddly at variance with his words: "Do you think then, dear woman, that she'll last the night?"

Daisy had the goodness to blush and supply her opinion that her ladyship was in no grave danger of being put to bed with a shovel.

"Oh, bless you, woman," his lordship thanked her. "How you console my mind. But wait." He held up a restraining hand as Daisy was about to take her hasty exit. "I would consider it a kindness if you would inform her ladyship that I shall make it a special point to check on her personally before I retire. No, no," he shook his head as Daisy launched into a garbled protest, "I assure you, Daisy, it is no imposition. Her ladyship would, I am persuaded, be devastated, simply devastated, if I—her husband of only a few days—should be so remiss as to not make her health my prime concern."

St. John's smile, which he permitted to replace his serious frown of husbandly solicitude once Daisy had curtsied awkwardly and sped from the room as if the Devil himself was on her heels, was distinctly evil.

His aura of husbandly distress already discarded, he now contemplated a suitable punishment for his prevaricating bride (who was at that very moment pacing her bedchamber roundly cursing her insufferable husband, who apparently believed her every ploy to be transparent to him — the nerve of the man!).

That Lord Royston had a fair inkling of his wife's plan for the evening — having him chase her until she caught him, bless her — went a long way toward keeping a smile on his face all through his evening toilette, presided over by no less than his valet, two honored footmen, and the majestic countenance of Carstairs himself in the role of general overseer. Standing before his shaving table—a deceptively plain mahogany affair that had only moments before been miraculously transformed into a dressing stand by means of secret drawers, catches and levers, and complete with a large mirror that had been raised by means of a spring latch—he surveyed the results of his labors amid his servants' hushed murmurs of awed appreciation.

He silently agreed with their opinion that he looked "fair top-o-the-trees" in his full-length maroon silk dressing gown, casually draped neck scarf, and moroccan slippers. The silvery wings at his temples accented his carefully pomaded black curls and—yes, he complimented himself silently—he was right to have endured the offices of Carstairs as the august butler himself had deigned to shave him for the second time that day. He looked, he chuckled quietly, ready for anything.

Royston was sure Samantha had heard the bustle of preparation taking place this past half hour in the dressing room beside the main bedchamber. He wondered what he would find once he opened the connecting door—his bride cowering nervously under the bedcovers, perhaps?

He shook his head. No. Lying in wait, possibly—but never cowering in terror. With studied nonchalance, he dismissed his attendants and walked purposefully toward the door that stood between him and his "ailing" wife. One well-defined eyebrow rose in slight surprise to find the door unlocked as he stepped into the darkened room, where the only illumination came from a small brace of candles reflected in the mirror behind the Hepplewhite dresser.

"Samantha?" he called softly, as his eyes fought to grow accustomed to the dimness. A prickle of apprehension touched lightly between his shoulder blades, and he was careful to keep his back to the wall as he turned his seeking eyes from side to side. It didn't hurt to be a bit prudent when dealing with one such as Samantha: there was no telling what sort of rig she was running.

Finally, when she felt his nerves to be sufficiently stretched, Samantha stepped out of the darkness of the far corner of the chamber and addressed her husband. "Good evening, Zachary."

The sudden sound, after long moments spent in eerie silence, would have caused many a man to give a start, or flinch, or in some other way give evidence of some slight agitation. But St. John, not being just any man, merely turned slowly in the direction from whence his wife's voice came, returned her polite greeting, and proceeded to devour her visually from beneath his casually lowered eyelids.

Samantha's choice of nightwear this evening was enough to set even so jaded a palate as Royston's to watering, as it consisted of a cunningly simple gown and outer robe done in emerald-green shot silk—a material that hugged every one of Samantha's several delectable curves and angles and shimmered and changed color with her every movement, her every breath. Her long auburn hair, unbound and tumbling about her shoulders, seemed to move with a life of its own, and Samantha's eyes sparkled as they took in Zachary's reaction to her appearance.

She decided this was not the time to quibble over her earlier story of indisposition. She felt St. John would oblige her by not teasing her with her fib if she didn't mention it, and so proceeded directly to the next step of her plan.

"You like my gown, Zachary?" she asked as she languidly lifted one hand to push back an errant curl. It was a move calculated to inflame her husband's senses, or those of any other male, provided he had eyes in his head and numbered not five years more than Methuselah.

"Imp," Zachary returned with a grin, "if you knew but half of what the sight of you in that particular gown puts me in mind of, you would run screaming from this room in terror."

"T-terror, my lord?" Samantha queried.

St. John began to move in his wife's direction. "Not terror, perhaps that is too strong a word. Substitute instead the word anticipation, and, knowing your love of adventure as I do, change the course of your flight from away from me to—"

"You flatter yourself, sir," Samantha interrupted hastily, retreating a step. "Let me tell you something, Zachary—"

St. John advanced another pace. "Tell me anything you want, puss," he soothed, not completely hiding the gleam in his eye.

When it became obvious that just one more step would bring him face to face with her, Samantha's show of bravado wilted and she scampered out of reach behind a nearby chair. "Oh, this isn't going at all as I'd planned," she wailed pettishly.