Her Christmas Earl (2 page)

She told herself she didn’t mind. And didn’t believe it for a minute.

“Stop this nonsense immediately and open this door,” she demanded breathlessly.

“Have I persuaded you against breaking into anyone else’s room?” he asked without shifting. “Especially if the anyone else is a man.”

Shock made her hand drop away from the doorknob. “You’re trying to teach me a
lesson
?” she hissed incredulously.

That familiar soft laugh played up and down her backbone like music, and she realized with an unwelcome frisson that the evocative scent filling the room was Lord Erskine’s own. The intimacy of recognizing his personal essence scared her more than being trapped with a rake.

“I am indeed.” In the tight space, she was close enough to hear him draw breath. More encroaching intimacy. “Step aside and I’ll set you free, chastened but unharmed. And hopefully a little wiser.”

Her snort was derisive. If her mother had heard the unmannerly response, she’d have a fit. But then so much of what Philippa did gave her mother the vapors. “Who on earth do you think you are? What a cheek.”

“Miss Sanders, I feel some humility is called for.” He still sounded as though he found her endlessly diverting. “If you’re as clever as you think you are, you wouldn’t be stuck here with a rake while your sister sleeps comfortably in her own bed, safely beyond scandal’s reach.”

The comment’s justice rankled. “You’re a very annoying man,” she muttered, wishing to heaven she’d left Amelia to solve her own problems.

“Undoubtedly,” he said without inflection. “But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong about you needing to temper valor with discretion.”

She bit back a blistering response about profligate libertines following their own advice and waited impatiently for him to let her out. She very much feared that if she spent much longer with the irritating Earl of Erskine, she’d strangle him with one of his neck cloths.

For what seemed a ridiculous length of time, Erskine rattled the doorknob.

“Stop playing games,” she said sharply, tired of his antics. He might find his teasing funny. She just wanted to leave this room and say goodnight and never see him again. “Unlock the door and let me out.”

He stopped tugging on the doorknob. A fraught silence fell. For the first time when he spoke, no trace of humor warmed his deep voice. “It’s stuck.”

“I don’t believe you.” The girl’s voice was impressively flat and steady.

Erskine should have guessed that the self-possessed Miss Philippa Sanders wouldn’t have hysterics when she learned she was confined with a rake. He didn’t need any light to know that disapproval weighted that direct brown gaze. For the last three days, he’d suffered that solemn, critical stare every time guests and family gathered.

Although she couldn’t see him, he shrugged. “That is, of course, your privilege.”

From the moment he’d seen her in this closet, reluctant excitement had thrummed in his veins. Although surely the small, brown-haired woman with uncompromising dark brows would strike most sane men as prim or dour.

Apparently he wasn’t sane.

Since their introduction, he’d wanted to shake this girl’s unnatural composure. Miss Sanders awoke all his worst impulses. Not since his schooldays had he wanted to pull a girl’s plait or put a mouse down her back just to stop her treating him like a member of some inferior species.

Erskine had grown up considerably from the boy who used such unproductive tactics on the pretty baker’s daughter. He’d immediately recognized that his urge to upset Miss Sanders’s calmness was similarly based in seeking her attention, if only in displeasure. And the heat swirling in his blood since she’d touched his bare chest was distinctly adult.

While he didn’t understand the fascination, he made a habit of being honest with himself. This observant little sparrow drew him in a way the fashionable and sophisticated London ladies never had. He was yet to work out why. This attraction’s inexplicable nature added to its power. In all this sprawling house, the only person who stirred a shred of interest was the woman regarding him the way she’d regard a worm in an apple.

An unusual experience for a man generally considered irresistible to the fairer sex.

He’d been right to suspect that more went on beneath her quiet exterior than she wanted the world to know. In the last five minutes, she’d displayed more spirit than she had in three days of staring him down. Perhaps he should have locked her in a cupboard the first day.

“You’ve got a key. Or you’ve clicked the lock somehow.”

She didn’t sound frightened, for which he was heartily grateful. Instead she sounded like a schoolmistress scolding a lazy pupil for sloppy arithmetic.

Good God, Erskine was in a bad way. Something in that stern voice made him want to grab her and kiss her until she lost the breath to berate him. “You’re not a very trusting soul, are you?”

Her sigh conveyed endless irritation. “Lord Erskine, you needn’t persist in this foolishness. You have my word that I will never invade another man’s bedchamber.”

He bit back an invitation to invade his bedchamber any time she fancied.

When he didn’t respond, she went on, still as if speaking to someone slow on the uptake. “Pray unlock the door. No harm has been done. My sister’s honor is safe because you destroyed the letter. You obviously realized that she’d written to you on a foolish impulse.”

Actually the beauteous Amelia’s letter had been incendiary in the extreme and had offered privileges nobody but a husband had the right to claim. Erskine spared a sympathetic thought for the chit’s fiancé. Mr. Gerald Fox put his pretty beloved high on a pedestal, a pedestal from which she was likely to topple before long.

Erskine kept his voice light, although he wondered if Amelia’s younger sister had any inkling of the letter’s contents. “So all is squared away and you go your merry way, with your uncharitable assessment of me intact.”

He didn’t see her frown, but he knew she did. He’d never been so attuned to a woman. And he hadn’t even kissed her yet.

At the thought of holding her naked in his arms, hunger shuddered through him. While she didn’t dress to display her body, he knew enough about women to guess what she’d look like out of that unfashionable blue frock. She might be slender, but the bosom curving beneath those discouragingly high collars was round and firm. He’d wager that description matched the rest of her.

Perhaps winter and this tedious house party encouraged a taste for more subtle attractions. Three days in her company had convinced Erskine that Philippa Sanders was a rare beauty indeed. He was just grateful that his blockheaded companions were too distracted by the false gold of her sister to notice.

“I hardly think you care about my opinion,” she said in a repressive tone.

“I’m a sensitive soul.”

“Clearly,” she responded just as drily. “Now unlock the door.” She paused and added a sugary edge to the next word. “
Please.”

He laughed, wondering why her bossiness charmed him. He didn’t in general like managing females, but something about this small, confident woman touched the heart he’d imagined immune to tenderness. “Did that hurt?”

Another of those delightful, dismissive snorts. “You’ve had your fun, my lord.”

Not by a long shot, my dear.
“Believe me, Miss Sanders, unless I can open this door, nothing can save you from the consequences of your foolishness. It seems fortune doesn’t favor the brave.”

He should be in a blind panic about what might happen if they were discovered together in such a compromising situation. Somehow, he…wasn’t.

“This isn’t funny.”

“I’m not laughing.” He paused. “You’re most welcome to search me if you believe I have a key.”

Her faint gasp made him wonder if she too relived that searing moment when she’d touched him. “The door’s really stuck?”

“It’s really stuck.”

He heard the faint rustle of her plain dark blue dress, the same dress she’d worn sitting across the table from him at dinner. Her expression had been critical as she’d observed her overbearing cousin’s attempts to captivate him. Caroline had been almost as busy as the beauteous Amelia making cow eyes at him.

When he’d accepted Sir Theodore Liddell’s invitation, he hadn’t realized matchmaking lay on the horizon. Although damn it, he should have. He was hardly a green boy when it came to ambitious parents.

Beside him, the doorknob rattled. Miss Sanders wasn’t one to give up before she was well and truly defeated. He admired her stalwart soul. He’d mocked her bravery in sneaking into his room to steal her sister’s letter, but it was a damned gallant act. An act that, unless they were very lucky, would have major repercussions.

As she moved, he caught a drift of her scent. Like Philippa Sanders, it was an intriguing mixture of tart and sweet. Lemon soap. And something warmer and earthier.

He couldn’t let her continue battling with the door. Already she breathed in frantic little gasps. He placed his hand over hers. There was that same shock of connection that he’d felt when she flattened her palm on his bare chest. “Do you believe me now?”

“Yes.” She sounded young and frightened, not at all like the assertive miss who had demanded the letter’s return. “This is such a disaster. We can’t say here alone. What if someone finds us?”

ERSKINE DIDN’T EVEN consider sugarcoating his response. “We’ll find ourselves in the middle of an almighty scandal.”

“Please…please try and get the door open.”

Her shaky request tugged at his heart. No, she didn’t sound at all like the imperious chit so keen to put him in his place. Of course she was frightened. He was a stranger and he could imagine what exaggerated stories she’d heard about his amorous exploits. Hell, even without exaggeration, the truth was bad enough to terrify an innocent.

This tiny room wasn’t his preferred venue for flirtation, but up to this point, unrepentant devil he was, he’d enjoyed himself. More, he hated to admit, than he had in years.

But because of that barely concealed fear in her voice, he accepted that he must make some genuine attempt to break free. With a muffled sigh, he stepped back, braced himself, and plowed his shoulder into the solid oak door.

Then bit back a decidedly unheroic groan.

Hartley Manor had been built for a more warlike age. It was designed to withstand trebuchets and cannons. A mere human shoulder, no matter how enthusiastically applied, hardly rattled the latch. All Erskine got for his trouble was a bruised arm.

Although Miss Sanders didn’t speak, he felt her desperate hope that he’d get them out. Only that made him apply himself twice more to battering at the door. With equally disappointing results.

“It’s useless.” Miss Sanders paused, and for the first time, he heard a trace of warmth. “But thank you for trying. I can’t imagine this is your idea of the nicest way to spend Christmas Eve either.”

She’d think he was mad if he told her that right now he couldn’t think of another person he’d rather have with him. Was he getting old? He was only twenty-eight, but this last year or so, the parade of decadent pleasures had begun to pall. As a younger man, he’d enjoyed kicking up his heels in London and shocking his straitlaced and tyrannical father back in Scotland. But since the old man’s death two years ago, Erskine had a grim feeling that his hell-raising smacked of going through the motions. Nothing in ages had compared to the piquant thrill of knowing that he and Philippa Sanders were alone together—and that at last he might discover what lurked beneath her serene shell.

“Someone will come and get us.”

Her laugh was hollow, but he admired her ability to squeeze amusement, however bleak, from their dilemma. He heard a faint bump as she slumped against the wall beside him. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“Odds are that it will be my valet Mills. He’s the soul of discretion.” With a master of such rackety reputation, Mills had to be.

“Does he wait up for you?” She sounded a little brighter. “Perhaps he’ll check soon.”

Erskine slid to the carpeted floor and leaned his head against the recalcitrant door. He extended his legs until his feet bumped the opposite wall. Stupidly he hated to disappoint her. Absurd as it was, she awoke a faint chivalry in his black soul. “I gave him the night off.”