The Temptation of Your Touch (2 page)

He would rather have people fear him than pity him. His ferocious demeanor also discouraged the well-meaning women who found it unthinkable that a man who had been one of the most eligible catches in England for over a decade should have been so unceremoniously thrown over by his chosen bride. They were only too eager to cast him in the role of wounded hero, a man who might welcome their clucks of sympathy and fawning attempts to comfort him, both on the ballroom floor and between the sheets of their beds.

Shaking his head in disgust, Max turned on his heel and went striding toward his own carriage. He needed to get out of London before he cast an even greater stain over his family’s good name and his own title by killing someone. Most likely himself.

The lieutenant returned the pistol to its
mahogany case before trotting after Max. “M-m-my lord?” he asked, his stammer betraying his nervousness. “W-where are you going?”

“Probably hell,” Max snapped without breaking his stride. “All that remains to be seen is how long it will take me to get there.”

Chapter Two

“A
NNIE!
A
NNIE!
I’
VE SOMETHING
you must see!”

Anne Spencer withdrew her head from the castiron oven as young Dickon came racing into the kitchen of Cadgwyck Manor, all gangly limbs and boundless enthusiasm. With its low ceiling, exposed rafters, massive stone hearth, and scattering of faded rag rugs, the kitchen was by far the most cozy chamber in the drafty, old manor and the one where its residents chose to spend most of their free time.

“Mind your tongue, lad,” Anne scolded as she slid a large wooden paddle from the stove and swung it toward the sturdy pine table, depositing two loaves of freshly baked bread topped with buttery, golden crusts on the table’s scarred top.

Having never dreamed she would excel at such a domestic pursuit, she could not resist sparing a moment to admire her handiwork. Most of her early
efforts at baking had resulted in the ancient stove’s belching black clouds of smoke before it coughed up something that looked more like a smoldering lump of suet than anything fit to be consumed by humans.

By the time she returned her attention to Dickon, he was bouncing up and down on his heels with excitement. “How many times have I told you how important it is to stay in the habit of addressing me as Mrs. Spencer?”

“Even when there’s no one around to hear?”

“Beer? There’s no beer, lad, and if there was, you’d be too young to drink it.”

They both turned to look at the old woman rocking in a chair in the corner of the kitchen. Nana squinted at them through her rheumy eyes, the merry click of her knitting needles never faltering despite her gnarled fingers and swollen knuckles. They had long ago stopped trying to guess what she could be knitting. It might have started out as a stocking or a scarf, but now it trailed behind her wherever she shuffled, growing longer each time Anne scraped aside a few pennies to buy another skein of wool at the market.

Anne exchanged an amused look with Dickon before saying loudly, “Don’t fret, Nana. Our young Dickon here has always preferred brandy to beer.”

Harrumphing her amusement at Anne’s jest,
Nana returned to her knitting. Her hearing might be failing her, but her mind was still sharp as the proverbial tack.

Setting aside the paddle and dusting the flour from her hands, Anne nodded toward the rotund pooch napping on the rug closest to the hearth. “Nana might be too deaf to hear you, but what about dear old Piddles over there? He’s always been an insatiable gossip.” Piddles, the rather ill-favored and ill-tempered result of a sordid tryst between a pug and a bulldog, lifted his grizzled head just long enough to give them a disdainful snuffle through his flattened nose before curling himself back into a ball. Anne pointed at the calico cat who was treating the threadbare cushion of the other rocking chair as if it were his own private throne. “And then there’s Sir Fluffytoes. Who knows what secrets the rascal might reveal to his numerous ladyloves to coax them out of their drawers?”

Dickon wrinkled his sun-freckled nose at her. “Now you’re just being silly. Everyone knows cats don’t wear drawers—only bibs, boots, and mittens.”

Laughing, Anne gave Dickon’s already hopelessly tousled tawny hair an affectionate rumple. “So what treasure have you brought for me today? Another dinosaur egg perhaps or the mummified corpse of a shrew that met its tragic fate at the merciless claws of Sir Fluffytoes?”

Dickon gave her a reproachful look. “I never said that was a dinosaur egg. I said dinosaurs had a right number of things in common with birds.”

As the lad reached into his jacket, Anne recoiled out of habit. She had learned from bitter experience to check his pockets for snakes, frogs, mice, or any other reptile or rodent likely to send Lisbeth or one of the more squeamish housemaids into a fit of shrieking hysterics. Her smile faded as Dickon’s freckled hand emerged with an expensive-looking square of vellum sealed with a daub of scarlet wax. “It was waiting for us in the village.”

Anne took the letter from his hand, almost wishing it
were
a snake.

In her experience, the post rarely brought good news. A quick perusal of the exclusive Bond Street address on the outside of the missive confirmed today was going to be no exception to that rule.

Just as she had expected, the letter wasn’t addressed to her but to Mr. Horatio Hodges, the butler and de facto head of the household whenever the manor’s current master was not in residence.

Ignoring that small fact, Anne slipped one chipped fingernail beneath the wax seal and unfolded the cream-colored sheet of paper. As she scanned the letter’s contents, her face must have revealed far more than she intended for Dickon immediately snatched the missive from her unsteady hands, his lips moving
as he struggled to decipher the elegant handwriting. Anne had patiently been working with him on his letters, no easy feat when he much preferred to be out roaming the moors or scouring the steep cliffs for long-forgotten smugglers’ caves or cormorant nests.

Even with his limited reading skills, it didn’t take Dickon long to understand the gravity of their situation. When he lifted his eyes to her face, dismay had darkened their caramel-colored depths. “We’re getting a new master?”

“Disaster?” Nana echoed loudly, her needles still clicking. “Is there a disaster?”

“So it seems,” Anne replied grimly, swiping a smudge of flour from her flushed cheek. Given that she had sworn no man would ever be her master, the irony of their predicament did not escape her. “I was so hoping they would leave us to our own devices for a while.”

“Don’t look so worried, Annie—I mean,
Mrs. Spencer
.” At the exalted age of twelve, Dickon considered himself a man full grown and more than capable of looking after them all. Anne wondered if she was to blame for forcing him to grow up too fast. “I doubt the gent will be here long enough to trouble any of us. We made short enough work of the last one, didn’t we?”

A reluctant smile canted Anne’s lips as she
remembered the sight of their former
master
bolting over the hill toward the village as if the Beast of Bodmin Moor were snapping at his heels. Since he had publicly sworn he would never again set foot on the property, she had anticipated he might sell the manor or foist it off on some unsuspecting relative. She just hadn’t expected it to be so soon.

“And then there was the one before that,” Dickon reminded her.

They’d barely avoided an official inquiry over that one. The village constable still looked at Anne askance when she did her shopping at market on Fridays, forcing her to don her most guileless smile.

“That one wasn’t precisely our doing,” she reminded Dickon. “And I thought we all agreed we would speak of him no more. God rest his lascivious soul,” she muttered beneath her breath.

“Well, if you ask me,” Dickon said darkly, “the rotter got just what he deserved.”

“No one asked you.” Anne plucked the note from Dickon’s hand to give it a more thorough reading. “It seems our new master is to be a Lord Dravenwood.”

Something about the very name sent a shiver of foreboding down Anne’s spine. Once, she might have recognized the name, would have known exactly who the gentleman’s mother, father, and second cousins thrice removed were. But the noble
lineages immortalized between the covers of
Debrett’s Peerage
had long ago given way in her brain to more practical information, like how to beat a generation of dust out of a drawing-room rug or how to dress a single brace of scrawny partridges so they would feed ten hungry servants.

She squinted, trying to read between the lines, but nothing in the letter from the earl’s solicitor gave a clue as to their new master’s character or whether the man would be arriving with a wife and half a dozen pampered bratlings in tow. With any luck he’d be some potbellied, gout-ridden sot in his dotage, already half-addled from decades of overindulging in too many overly rich plum puddings and after-dinner brandies.

“Oh, no,” she whispered, dread pooling low and heavy in her breast as her gaze fell on the date neatly inscribed at the top of the page. A date she’d overlooked in her haste to read the rest of the letter.

“What is it?” Dickon was beginning to look worried again.

Anne lifted her stricken eyes to his face. “This letter is dated nearly a month ago. The post must have been delayed in reaching the village. Lord Dravenwood isn’t scheduled to arrive at the manor a week from today. He’s scheduled to arrive . . .
tonight!
”

“Bloody hell,” Dickon muttered. Anne might have
chided him for swearing if his words hadn’t echoed her own feelings so precisely. “What are we going to do?” the boy asked.

Gathering her scattered composure, Anne tucked the letter into the pocket of her apron, her mind working frantically. “Fetch Pippa and the others immediately. We haven’t a second to squander if we hope to give our new master the welcome he deserves.”

Chapter Three

T
HE JOURNEY TO HELL
was much shorter than Max had anticipated. It seemed the abode of the damned wasn’t located in the stygian depths of the underworld but on the southwest coast of England in a wild and windswept place the unbelievers had christened Cornwall.

As his hired carriage jolted its way across the stony sweep of Bodmin Moor, rain lashed at the conveyance’s windows while thunder growled in the distance. Max drew back the velvet curtain veiling the window, narrowing his eyes to peer into the night beyond. He caught a brief glimpse of his own scowling reflection before a violent flash of lightning threw the bleak landscape into stark relief. The lightning vanished as quickly as it had come, plunging the moor back into a darkness as thick and oppressive as death. Given how ridiculously overwrought the entire scene was, Max wouldn’t have been surprised
to hear the ghostly hoofbeats of King Arthur and his knights as a spectral Mordred pursued them or to see the Bodmin Beast, the phantom creature who was said to haunt these parts, loping along beside the carriage, eyes glowing red and teeth bared.

Letting the curtain fall, he settled back on the plush squabs, feeling an unexpected rush of exhilaration. The rugged terrain and ferocious weather perfectly suited his current temper. If he had sought to banish himself from the comforts and charms of civilization, he had chosen well. The bone-rattling journey from London alone would have been penance enough for a less sinful man.

There had been a time when his father might have tried to talk him out of leaving London. But when the gossip about Max’s duel had reached the duke’s ears—and the society pages of the more sordid scandal sheets—the duke had been forced to admit it might be in everyone’s best interests if Max took a brief
respite
from polite company. His father still hadn’t recovered from the blow of Max’s resigning his prestigious position with the East India Company. Even Max’s mother, who had yet to give up on her cherished hope that Max would find a new—and far more suitable—bride, had managed no more than a token protest when informed of his plan to manage the most remote property in the family’s extensive holdings.