Ethan: Lord of Scandals (11 page)

“Now we just sit here.” Ethan’s voice was right at her ear, his cedar scent was a soothing fragrance on an otherwise horsy breeze, and his chest was a solid presence at her back. “We’re well trained, and we know we don’t take a step until my lady tells us to. I don’t think it’s quite as warm today as it was yesterday.”

Hang
the
bloody
weather.
“Neither as hot nor as humid.”

“I asked you what you’d consider a treat by way of reward when we saddled up. You never answered,” Ethan reminded her pleasantly. His hands were resting lightly on her waist, and but for that, Alice knew, she knew in her bones, and muscles, and organs, she’d fall and be dragged again.

“Getting off would be my best treat.” Though in the barn, when Ethan had mentioned a treat, she’d been helpless not to gaze at his mouth. “How long do we sit here?”

“Until you tell him to do something else, but I want to know your next-best treat.”

Alice gave the smallest, most useless tap of her heels. “And I want this to be over.”

Waltzer moved one front hoof then swung his left ear forward and back.

“Again,” Ethan coaxed. “He wasn’t sure you meant it, and he’s asking for clearer orders.”

Alice felt her shoulders move with the depth of her breathing, but she gave her mount a firmer tap, and he moved two steps then flicked his ear again. She wanted to pat him for being such a careful horse, but that would mean moving her hands, which were gripping the reins for dear life.

“Try again,” Ethan said. “This time, let your seat go a little too, or he’ll think you mean go with your heels but stop with your seat.”

“My
seat
?”

“Your hips. Here.” He pressed against her waist and angled his hands down, as if to rock her hips in the saddle. “You recall the motion of it from your childhood rides. Just think about it when you tap him again.”

Alice tried it, and the horse started walking at a very sedate pace.

“Oh, God. Now I have to steer.”

“Not necessarily. He’ll go forward in this direction until he lumbers up to the fence, and then he’ll stop and ask you what you want next. Watch.”

Because she couldn’t do anything else and breathe, Alice did as Ethan suggested. The horse stopped, sighed, then turned his head around to peer at Alice’s knee.

“What next?” Ethan interpreted. “Just tap again, and because he’s already looking around to the right, he’ll probably saunter in that direction.”

It took two tries, but the horse was rapidly figuring out the game.

Ethan kept his hands on her waist. “I think you might steer, if you wanted to.”

Hang
him
and
his
helpful
thoughts.
“Oh, no, I couldn’t. We’ll just find our way to the rail again.”

“Let’s be very daring.” Ethan dropped his voice. “Try another turn to the right.”

“Ethan,
please
don’t make me do this.”

“We’ll stop when you say, Alice, though I think you could steer us back to the mounting block.”

She bit her lip, because she didn’t want to get off all the way down to the ground. Just as she tentatively tugged on the right rein, the gelding began to shuffle along in that direction.

“Can he read my mind? Or did you make him do that?”

“You did it. You looked at the mounting block, you probably leaned toward it, and you picked up the right rein. Now why is it,” he went on in the most conversational tones, “you won’t tell me what your second-best treat is?”

“Hush,” Alice hissed. “He’s coming to the mounting block.”

Except he’d approached at an angle, and because the previous three times the horse had asked, the lady had told him to bear right, Waltzer, being an obliging soul, sauntered past the mounting block and strolled off to the right.

“Oh, blast and damn,” Alice wailed. “Now what?”

“Such language. Now you simply steer him back toward where you want him, and this time, we’ll ask him to stop.”

“I can’t. They don’t go when you ask. They don’t stop when you ask. They turn by themselves, and they’re just too big…”

“You’re doing splendidly, but think of wee Waltzer as a little boy, Alice. You have to tell him how to go on, and when you’re crossing a busy thoroughfare with a small child, you take his hand firmly. To Waltzer, there are many distractions, such as every blade of grass, every dropping, every breeze and sunbeam. You must make your directions clear, so it’s easy for your charge to know his task.”

In the midst of that little homily, Alice’s hips had finally started moving in rhythm with the horse’s walk. The image of the horse as a child in need of guidance tapped some vein of confidence unknown even to her, because she wordlessly directed him back to the mounting block, but this time, steered him left as they went around it. Ethan kept silent behind her but kept his hands on her waist as well.

“And now,” Ethan suggested a few minutes later, “you must tell him he’s doing well.”

“You’re doing well, Waltzer. You’d best keep doing well.” And Ethan Grey had best shut his helpful, interfering, gorgeous, handsome mouth.

“Oh, that was encouraging to a lad who’s trying his heart out for you. He doesn’t understand your words, Alice.”

“So you tell him.” She was beginning to think her best treat would not be forbidden pleasures with Ethan Grey, but rather, to fashion a gag for him.

“Pet the boy. Put both reins in one hand and pet him on his neck. He’ll be your devoted and humble slave.”

“Devoted
and
humble.” Alice carefully arranged the reins and leaned forward slightly to pet the animal’s neck.

“Tell him.”

“Good boy, Waltzer,” Alice said softly. “Very dear, good boy.”

“Well done. Now take me home, Alice, and don’t spare the horse.”

She actually nudged a little with her seat and steered the gelding on a direct course for the larger mounting block, then halted him right alongside of it.

“Oh, well done, indeed. And off we go.”

“Exactly, how?” Alice kept her eyes forward, because she’d done well so far by not looking at the ground. “I know how to do it with a stirrup, but this…”

“It’s simple. Waltzer will hold absolutely still while I get off, and then you will let me assist you.”

“How do you know he’ll hold still?” In the time it had taken Alice to state her question, Ethan had slid over the horse’s tail, landed on the ground, and hopped to the top of the ladies’ mounting block.

“Rest the reins on his neck, Alice. He won’t budge, since he understands his exertions are done.”

Alice put the reins down and tried to breathe. Bad things could happen during a dismount. Awful things. “Ethan, please get me off this animal.”

“Arms around my neck,” he coached. “Hold tight, and I’ll lift you out of the saddle on three.” Except the scurrilous varlet lifted on “one,” and Alice was on her feet, standing in his embrace, before she could even close her eyes in dread.

“See?” Ethan smiled down at her. “You’re safe and sound, Waltzer is dutifully catching a nap, and all is well.”

“Oh, Ethan.” She slumped against him, needing the physical support—surely she was entitled to that? “That was awful. That was the worst… I can’t…” She huffed out an enormous sigh, feeling lighter and looser than she had in years—despite the trembling in her knees. “It wasn’t awful. It wasn’t awful at all. You’ll give Waltzer a treat?”

“Waltzer is given a regular ration of oats for his efforts. I’m interested instead in the treats that would appeal to you.”

His smile was approving and genuine, almost tender. Alice was about to go up on her toes and seize for herself a sample of the treat she most desired when a patrician voice called out from the back of a large black horse over by the arena gate.

“Greetings, all. Have I come at a bad time?”

Why had she waited so long to
try
simply controlling a horse? Alice had been on a strange horse when she’d had her accident, a beast she’d never seen before, much less ridden, and she’d been in a panic even before she leapt onto its back and found the stirrup leathers much too long for her legs.

And having ridden again… this was heady stuff, this feeling of lightness and joy, something she would never have predicted. Had the Earl of Greymoor not come calling, Alice would have hugged Waltzer and kissed him on his big, horsy nose.

“Miss Portman?” A single knock on her door told her Ethan Grey was not going to allow her more solitude.

“Come in,” she called, hopping off the bed. She wanted to throw her arms around him too, and squeal like little Priscilla in a happy moment.

“One notes you are smiling, madam. This is encouraging.”

“I can breathe.” She beamed at him shamelessly where he lingered near the door. “And I met an earl.”

“A half-smitten earl.” He did not sound pleased about this. “Once he’d dispensed with the issuance of a social invitation, Greymoor complimented your eyes specifically and called you pretty when you’d abandoned us. He barely bothered to inspect me or my property.”

“I did not abandon you.” An
earl
had called her pretty, though the earl was clearly smitten with the small blond girl he’d had up before him.

“You most certainly abandoned me,” Ethan groused right back, taking a couple of steps into the room. “Lady Lucy rifled the entire library before tossing a book directly at her papa’s lemonade, managing to provide him, his shirt, waistcoat, and cravat quite the cold bath. I was obliged to loan the man clothing and entertain his offspring while he made himself presentable.”

He sounded quite pleased with himself, lending clothing to an earl attacked by a toddler.

“You poor thing. Having to manage a single, adorable child for an entire five minutes. The boys will be so proud of you.”

“
You
are supposed to be proud of me.” He ambled closer then stopped by her escritoire. “Lady Lucy is accounted a woman of particulars, and I convinced her not to shatter my hapless eardrums with her caterwauling.”

Had they teased each other like this before? “Children are sometimes fascinated with strangers. You should be pleased, nonetheless. Generally, the young have good instincts about people.”

“How you flatter me, Miss Portman.” He offered an ironic bow. “May I take it you are none the worse for having ridden with me? Be honest, Alice.”

Alice. The way he used her name was sweet, special, and a little stern. “No trouble breathing. I cannot credit it. For the past twelve years, any time I have been at the mercy of a horse, I could not manage it.”

“You managed it today. I am pleased for you, Alice Portman.”

Alice recalled the feel of him at her back on the horse, steady, solid, and calm. She grabbed her courage with both hands and locked her gaze with his. “Pleased enough to help me try again?”

“Of course.”

How easily he assented. “It might not go as well. In fact it probably won’t.”

His lips quirked up. “Or it might go better.”

“I would settle for being able to start, stop, and steer at a placid walk,” Alice said. “I would be thrilled with that, to be honest.”

And when was the last time she’d been thrilled with anything? Anything save her employer’s kisses?

***

“You look so serious.” Ethan frowned at Alice, wondering what went on inside her busy head. Her second venture in the riding arena, between tea and supper, had gone without incident, much to his relief. “Are you doing as the jockeys do at Newmarket and reliving each moment of your ride?”

She walked along beside him in silence for a moment, the evening sun finding red highlights in her hair. “Hardly that. I am contemplating the contrasts in my life.”

“This sounds weighty. Shall we pursue the topic while we stroll?” He offered his arm, and she took it, something that might have been a minor struggle between them only days ago. “Tell me about these contrasts in your life, Alice Portman.”

“When I lived at Sutcliffe,” Alice said as they reached a gravel walk that turned toward the stream, “we had such quiet. Days and days of quiet, nothing louder than Reese’s voice in conversation with my own.”

“It sounds Gothic.” Also like a waste of at least two women. “Were you happy there?”

“I enjoyed Reese and Pris,” Alice said, “but it was a bleak place. Most of the servants did not respect the lady of the house, which meant a great deal of work went undone. We managed our own mending, much of our own cooking and cleaning. If we wanted a bath, we carried the water, or it would not come up hot.”

“You lived as if you had no servants.” As if she
deserved
to have no servants. “Shall we sit? The evening grows pretty, and we are not at the end of this discussion.”

“We aren’t?” Alice settled on a bench at the base of a venerable oak. The tree was so large two people on the bench could both lean back against the trunk comfortably.

“We are not.” Ethan lowered himself beside her and wondered idly how many kisses the tree had witnessed. “The topic is contrast in the life of Miss Alice Portman.”

“So it is,” Alice said. “In any case, my life now is different from what it was for five years.”

“Different, how?” Ethan let his back rest against the oak and crossed his ankles. He did not take her hand, not when she was working up to confidences of some sort.

“Sutcliffe was peaceful. Predictable, stable, and safe.”

“You aren’t safe now? Should I be concerned?”

“Safe…” Alice huffed out a breath. “It’s hard to define what I mean by that. Relative to my time at Sutcliffe, my time since then has been a constant uproar.”

Uproar was not a good thing. Something cold trickled down Ethan’s spine, so he went on the offensive.

“You wanted a quiet rural post, and instead you find yourself dealing with an oversized, widowed social misfit, riding a comparably oversized horse, and a neighborhood full of titles suddenly expecting you to provide your charges—among whose number I might include myself—for socializing.”

If she left them… that cold sensation congealed into that familiar and unhappy acquaintance: dread.

“I feel as if,” Alice said slowly, “the mild breeze I’d used to sail along in my little boat has turned into a fickle gale, tossing me in all directions at once.”

“You’re knocked off your pins. It isn’t a pleasant sensation.”

“I thought you were going to say, ‘I’m knocked off my horse,’” Alice said softly. “And maybe that’s it. I feel a little of the same disorientation as I did then, when I was minding my girlish business one day and then literally knocked off my horse the next.”

Rage at her malefactors warred with the compulsion to take her in his arms.

“Your disorientation is understandable. The sensation will likely fade in time, as you gather more confidence in your changed circumstances.” But always, upset like this took too bloody much time to fade. Years and lifetimes.

“It isn’t…” Alice bit her lip and colored up furiously. “It isn’t just my circumstances.”

Ethan had to lean closer to catch her words, which had the effect of filling his awareness with lemon verbena. “I beg your pardon?”

“It isn’t just my circumstances,” Alice said a little more loudly. “I am knocked off my pins by… you.”

Silence, as Ethan studied Alice’s profile, from the compressed line of her lips, to the brilliant blush on her cheeks, to the quiet misery in her eyes.

“Alice?” His voice was carefully neutral. “Can you explain yourself?”

He gave her credit for turning to face him, despite the blush trying to swamp her dignity. “You are part of this gale-force wind, Ethan Grey. You…” When she might have risen and paced off to a safe distance, he laced his fingers around her wrist.

“Tell me,” he commanded softly. “Please.”

And because of that one entreating word, he knew she would.

“You touch me,” she said, dropping her gaze to her lap. “When I had such a bad breathing spell, you weren’t too fussy to offer comfort to a mere governess. At Belle Maison, on Argus, you put your arms around me, and I did not fall. Here, on the horse, you don’t let me fall, and then too…”

“Then?”

“You kissed me,” Alice said, her voice dropping again. And Ethan realized that she’d gone long years without a friend, but far longer years without a kiss.

“I kissed you,” Ethan said, “but you kissed me as well.” He was fiercely glad to recall this.

“And there is the problem.”

“Are you making too much of a single incident, Alice? You aren’t going to leave your post over some backward female notion of protecting my honor, are you?”

“It isn’t that one kiss. It’s that I want another.”

Thank God for all His mercies. “Does this have to be a problem?”

She was female, and she was Alice, so his question was rhetorical.

“Of course it’s a problem. You are my employer, and by all rights, if you’re kissing a decent woman, you ought to be doing so in the interest of finding a mother for your boys. You need not humor a lonely governess.”

“Good God.” Ethan shot to his feet and jammed his hands in his pockets. “Is that why you think I kissed you?”

“You’re kind, though you’re shy about it.” Alice rose as well, her chin coming up as her blush faded. “I know this about you, and I know as well that in the years I’ve been in service, I haven’t exactly had to fend off the advances of drooling hordes of fevered men.”

“I should hope not!” Ethan looked at her in consternation. “You wear those great ugly glasses that distort your lovely eyes, you scrape the most glorious hair on God’s earth back into an old woman’s snood, you dress as if in half mourning for your former life and in gowns that hide the most luscious…” He glared at her then reached for her with both hands, anchoring her by the upper arms and bringing her flush against him.

“I did not kiss you out of some condescending motive like pity, Alice. I kissed you because I had to, and I have to.”

He framed her jaw gently in his hands, angling her face toward his, and then brushed his lips across hers in a whisper-light warning caress. When she made a yearning sound, he joined their mouths and gathered her to him.

“Ah, God, Alice…” His sigh held longing, humor, and resignation to go with her name, and then got down to kissing her in earnest. One hand slid down her back, to press her tightly against his groin; the other drifted to her nape and buried itself under that scraped bun, and held her captive for his mouth.

He did not plunder, not exactly. He tasted and hinted and suggested, until Alice’s tongue was tangling with his, and her breathing was accelerating. Her hand found its way into his hair and, if anything, she was pressing her body eagerly to his.

Eagerly!

Which would lead them… Ethan withdrew his mouth and rested his chin on her crown. He wasn’t about to let her go, not when she rested against him nigh panting with the effects of a brief, fully clothed kiss.

“Dear Almighty God,” she whispered. “Dear Almighty, Everlasting God.”

“Amen.”

Alice raised her face from Ethan’s chest and regarded him curiously. “Are you laughing at me?”

“Good heavens, no.” Ethan stepped back, ignoring the shriek of disappointment echoing through his body. “I need to sit, Alice, and so do you.”

Though
she
at
least
wasn’t hiding her arousal.

And arousal itself was a relief for Ethan. He’d begun to conclude his capacity for unbridled passion had prematurely aged. In almost two decades of sexual experience, he couldn’t once recall being so physically enthusiastic about a woman so quickly. He’d learned caution at a high price, but with Alice…

“I’ll go,” Alice said quietly, and Ethan realized she was sitting a few inches from him on the bench, primly not touching. To blazing hell with that. He threaded his fingers through hers and drew her wrist to his lips, because nobody was going anywhere just yet.

“Back to the house? Or you’ll sail your little skiff right out of my life, out of the boys’ lives, and find another bucolic retreat where you can once again impersonate a forty-nine-year-old spinster?”

“You can’t allow an immoral influence around your children,” Alice said with soft insistence. “I can’t allow it.”

“Well, that’s all right, then.” Ethan reached out his free hand and drew it down Alice’s hairline. Her bun should have been in shambles, but it was like her today, well anchored in the proprieties. “If we’re to remove all pernicious influences from their lives, then I’ll merely accompany you, and they’ll be free of both our wicked selves.”

“You’re not wicked.”

“But you, who were the kissed, not the kisser, are somehow Satan’s imp?” He looped his arm across her shoulders and scooted to tuck himself against her. She wasn’t going to bolt off to her lesson plans until they’d come to some understandings, and—given her endless determination—that meant it could be a long evening.

“You are a man,” Alice said, a hint of exasperation in her voice.

“You noticed. How fortunate. I was at risk of forgetting it myself.”

Alice scowled at him. “You were not. You’re among the most masculine people I’ve met.”

“Because you’re a governess, sweetheart. You don’t exactly consort with the dragoons and the grenadiers.”

“I have brothers, Ethan Grey.” She was getting her dander up, which relieved Ethan no end. That meek, defeated version of Alice Portman made him want to howl and break things for her. “And my brothers have acquaintances, and I’ve been in your brother’s household, and Mr. Belmont’s, and Baron Sutcliffe’s. No governess goes into service without a keen wariness regarding a man’s animal urges.”

“And you are prepared to tell me about these urges? Say on, Alice. I’m all ears. My own urges haven’t been in evidence since shortly after Joshua was conceived, so you likely know more about my urges than I do.”

Her brows went up as the meaning of his words sank in.

“Hushed your scolding with that one, didn’t I?” Ethan muttered, surprised that Alice remained sitting snug against him, making no move to withdraw her hand from his. “Well, it’s the truth, my dear. I married unwisely, and life hadn’t exactly handed me the instincts of a libertine before that. The realization that my wife was a bad choice rather killed my appetite, and in the general sense, not just for her.”