London's Last True Scoundrel (7 page)

She took a step toward him. “Yes, there is another condition. You must not kiss me again, or try any … funny business.”

“Funny business. Hmm.” He contemplated her for a moment. “No, I’m afraid I can’t promise that.”

Her eyes snapped wide. “What?” The word came out as a squawk of outrage.

He spread his hands in a helpless gesture. “When I give my word, I don’t break it. And I fear that you, my dear Honey, are too much temptation for a man like me to resist.”

She tried to appear outraged and haughty but only managed to look sweetly discombobulated. “But—but—” she sputtered. “You would force yourself on me, even though I have asked you not to?”

“Ah, come now,” he said easily. “Who said anything about force?”

*   *   *

The man was a devil in rake’s clothing. Now he’d put her in an intolerable position. If she went with him, it would be tantamount to
asking
for his improper advances.

She couldn’t afford to refuse him and he knew it. The dastard.

London.

Even if she could not take part in the season or obtain those coveted Almack’s vouchers, being in London might be enough. Perhaps her cousin Griffin might take pity on her and intercede with her guardian on her behalf.

Oliver, Lord deVere, had routinely ignored her pleas for an advance on her inheritance to fund her come-out. Her persistence had finally been rewarded by a threat to marry her off to a toothless octogenarian marquis, so she’d given up.

But Lord deVere would have to listen to Griffin, wouldn’t he?

The price was to suffer the rakish advances of Lord Davenport for the space of a day.

“I have hat pins,” she warned him. “And I’m not afraid to use them.”

He winced. “There will be no need for hat pins, Honey, I assure you.”

“Miss deVere to you.”

“When we are in public,” he agreed, “I shall call you Miss deVere.”

She supposed she had to be satisfied with that.

He pursed his lips. “What shall we do about your brothers?”

Her resolve hardened. “We won’t tell them. They’ll still be sleeping off their excesses when we slip away tomorrow morning. We’ll send the carriage back with a message that I’m staying with Lady Tregarth.”

“So that’s settled then,” he said, matching her decisive tone.

His face was grave, but a wicked twinkle lurked in those dark eyes as he came toward her. “Shall we shake hands on the bargain?”

Feeling absurdly daring, she stuck out her hand. He took it in his, and time shuddered to a halt.

So much heat in his palm, so much strength in the clasp of his fingers. His hand was so large that it all but swallowed hers. The effect was electrifying; she felt it all the way down her spine.

She started, pulled away.

“I—I’d better see to dinner.” Her tone was all fluttery and breathless.
Ugh.
She could have kicked herself for sounding like such a dunce.

He gave her a smile so full of amused understanding that she regretted her former vow to remain civil to him.

With a scowl, she hurried away to the kitchens.

CHAPTER FIVE

By virtue of judicious dousing with cold water, Davenport sobered up the brothers deVere enough to sit down to dine with their sister and guest.

Honey had been astonished at Tom and Benedict’s easy acceptance of Davenport after he’d trounced them. For his part, Davenport soon saw that her brothers weren’t quite as bad as their earlier behavior might have suggested. Once they were a few degrees more sober, they admitted the impropriety of their behavior.

It was clear, however, that they did not intend to change their ways for their sister and would find any means they could to be rid of her.

That finally decided Davenport, had he needed persuasion in the matter, to abide by Honey’s wishes and keep their departure on the morrow secret.

By the time Honey had retired to bed, the deVere brothers were well on their way to oblivion once more. They wouldn’t wake before noon, he’d wager. By then, he and Honey would be long gone.

The surly manservant had shown Davenport to his room with bad grace, informing him that if he wanted something in the night not to bother calling, for there was no one but the mistress to hear him in this wing. With a belligerent stare at the broken bellpull as if daring it to resurrect itself, Hodgins stomped out, slamming the door behind him.

Davenport looked around. If the bedchamber they’d chosen for him was the best they had, he shuddered to think of the state the rest of the house must be in.

Plaster had cracked and fallen away in some places; curtains and hangings that once might have been green were moth-eaten and faded to the color of sludge. Dust lay thick on every surface, gathering in the grooves of the intricate, heavy carving on the bedposts. The canopy above his head bore so many holes it resembled a cobweb.

He lay on the most uncomfortable mattress he’d ever had the displeasure to encounter—and that was saying something for a man who’d been dumped in a barn the night before.

It didn’t help that he couldn’t stop thinking about Honey and the one promise he’d refused to make. He didn’t believe in cloaking his wicked intentions in virtue. She had to know he’d do everything he could to seduce her on the way to Town.

She’d informed him loftily that her maid would travel with her, for propriety’s sake. If the maid in question was the redoubtable Trixie, he foresaw few problems there.

His body pulsed in anticipation. Honey, with her toplofty manner and her tightly wound virtue. She was a challenge, and the uncertainty of success merely added spice to the chase.

Fantasies of a rocking carriage and a pliant Honey danced through his head.

He smiled into the darkness. Who needed sleep?

There was a loud, splitting crack.

Then the world fell in on top of him.

*   *   *

Hilary couldn’t sleep. She’d tried warm milk, counting sheep, reciting the litany of social rules she’d instructed her students to repeat by rote.

Drat the man! Nothing worked when she could see his smiling face, those sensual lips telling her he would most definitely
not
promise to keep his hands off her person on the way to London.

She recalled, all too vividly, the feel of those lips on hers, the warmth and hardness of him as his arm encircled her frozen body on that horse.

What would it have been like to be married to such a man?

Hilary shuddered to think of it. She’d wager he was a constant subject of gossip among the ton. With that cheerfully roving eye, he’d cut a swath through the ladies of London, whether he was a married man or no.

She didn’t regret that their betrothal had come to nothing. Indeed, the whole notion seemed to have been a figment of her mother’s imagination. That could well be the case. Marigold deVere had always harbored illusions of grandeur.

Ethereally pretty but dowerless, Hilary’s mother had come from a minor branch of an aristocratic family. Her notions had never fallen into step with those of her brutish husband, however, and her spirits had slowly declined until there was nothing left.

Marigold had given up, but her daughter wouldn’t. She would find a way to attain her dream if she had to brave all of Davenport’s attempts to ravish her.

Ravish
. The word held an illicit thrill, particularly in the context of Lord Davenport.

She did not want to think about that.

The threatened storm had not eventuated, leaving the air oddly sultry. Or perhaps it was the fire she’d ordered, so she could dry her hair at its heat before she went to bed.

She threw off the covers, tossed and turned a bit, pounded her pillow with the flat of her hand.

Double drat the man!

His face kept swimming up in her mind’s eye. That smiling, disreputably bruised, extraordinarily compelling face. And she’d still not caught a glimpse of his remarkable buttocks.…

A sound like the rumble of thunder made her start awake from her drowse. Disoriented, she glanced toward the window. A masculine shout made her realize that the thunder had come from inside the house.

“Oh, no!”

She leaped out of bed and flew into the corridor. The commotion had come from the guest bedchamber.

She hurried toward it and wrenched open the door.

There, stark naked with his back to her, in the midst of a pile of ceiling plaster and debris, stood Lord Davenport.

Hilary’s jaw dropped.

He was covered from head to toe in grayish-white plaster dust. He looked like a statue of a Greek god as he surveyed the wreckage, one hip negligently cocked. A David, a colossus still standing proud and tall through the sacking of Rome, with wide, muscled shoulders, a slim, tapered waist, and firm, taut buttocks.

Buttocks.

Hilary swallowed hard. Now she understood.

Her mind filled with understanding, in fact. She couldn’t seem to move or speak for understanding. Her thought processes ground to a complete halt.

He turned and saw her. “Oh, hello there.”

Her eyes popped. She opened her mouth. Closed it. David was
nothing
like it.

Gracious, but she’d never dreamed …

How on earth did he manage to walk around all day with
that
dangling between his legs? Flushing, she tore her gaze from his groin, only to fix on that imposing chest.

As easy in his nudity as he was in his clothes, Davenport gestured at the carnage behind him. “As you can see, there’s been a slight accident.”

From somewhere, she dredged up the ability to speak. “Put … some … clothes … on!”

He glanced about him, as if the notion had only just occurred. “Afraid I can’t. Your maid took my things away to see if she could get the mud out.”

Sheets. She thought of sheets, but the bedclothes were buried under the rubble.

“Ah.” He turned and reached up to yank down the bed curtain from a post that leaned drunkenly toward the bed.

The ripple of musculature in his back and buttocks as he fully extended his arm to pull down the threadbare damask made Hilary feel a little faint.

He took his time about arranging the curtain around his waist and securing it.

Dark eyes glinted at her through the mask of plaster dust as he put up his hand to brush some flakes of ceiling from his hair. He ought to appear ridiculous, she thought.

He was, in a word, magnificent.

Oh, dear.

Far too late, she averted her gaze. “You are not hurt?” she inquired, staring at the bedpost.

“No, I was lucky. I hadn’t managed to fall asleep yet, so I leaped from the bed in time.”

There was a taut silence while she wondered if the cause for his insomnia might mirror hers.

“You cannot stay here,” she declared. Talk about the obvious!

“No, I suspect you’re right about that.”

She tried to think of where else to put him. She’d have to make up another bed. And somehow draw a bath for him so he could wash all that plaster dust off.

“I apologize,” she said, though the words scraped in her throat. “It must have been a shock.”

“I’m still trembling,” he said. He held out his arms. “Hold me?”

That did not deserve a response. “I’ll order a bath, and while you’re…” She gestured with a flap of her hand, trying not to imagine that body of his, wet and naked in the tub.…

She cleared her throat. “While you do that, I’ll see to another bedchamber for you.”

She didn’t wait for his answer or look at him in the eye again. She hurried away, fighting the firework thrills of awareness his teasing request had set off inside her.

An agony of confusion dogged her as she went to fetch Trixie. Traversing corridors, climbing stairs, she scolded herself for her prurience. How much she’d wanted to stay right where she was and simply gawk at him. What a wicked temptation it had been to obey him when he’d asked her to hold him, plaster dust and all.

Ridiculous man. And she was worse, allowing herself to be caught up in his nonsense.

Even more mortifying than his nakedness was the reason behind it. Shame washed through her. What must he think of a family who let their house fall down around their ears? Her brothers refused to spend money on repairs to the old redbrick building, lavishing their income on their stables instead. Their living quarters shrank with every passing year as more rooms were shut up, abandoned to rot and decay.

Despite the need to distance herself from Lord Davenport, the desperation to get away from the Grange was greater.

Hilary lifted her chin. She could handle Lord Davenport. Once he had his clothes on again.

She scratched on the door of her maid’s attic room. She must treat Lord Davenport as a trial and a test of her good sense and self-restraint. If she could come through a journey to London with the greatest scoundrel in the country without allowing him the liberties he so clearly craved, it would be a triumph of virtue over sin.

But the clear memory emblazoned on her brain of him standing amongst the rubble in all his naked glory made her doubly thankful that Trixie was going with them.

As if in answer, the maid’s tremendous snore greeted Hilary as she opened the door.

She smiled wryly at the notion of Trixie lending her either propriety or moral support. Ah, well, she was better than nothing, Hilary supposed.

*   *   *

Davenport was vaguely embarrassed at all the fuss. But he was covered with plaster and he couldn’t see himself retiring to bed again in this state.

He said, “Please, do not trouble yourself further, Miss deVere. You ought to be in bed.”

She dismissed his objections. Clearly, she was humiliated by what had happened and determined to set all to rights.

So he let Honey and the saucy little maid bustle about. They roused one of the stable hands to boil water and carry it up.

All the while, Davenport tried to catch Honey’s eye, to draw her aside, but she was having none of it.

He even flexed his muscles a few times in an experimental manner, just to see if she was covertly watching him, but she had firmly averted her gaze. She didn’t speak to him the rest of the night.