Miss Molly Robbins Designs a Seduction (16 page)

As she reached for a bead in Carver’s warm, outstretched palm, she missed. They were very small, and the surface was shiny.

“Here,” he said, “let me.” He took one of the beads and held it for her. Somehow she got the point of her needle through the miniscule hole. “How lucky, Miss Robbins,” he observed softly, “that you are here.”

She said nothing, eager to preserve the proprieties under these strange circumstances. Just because one person misbehaved didn’t mean they all had to, as her mother would have said.

“Give the beads to me,” Lady Anne whispered. “Your presence is upsetting everyone, Danforthe. You really are too naughty. What are we going to do with you?”

“I am on tenterhooks to find out.”

“Danforthe!” Lady Anne exploded in giggles that shook her shoulders and thereby made Molly’s task even more trying. She slowed down, afraid of pricking the fidgeting young lady with her needle.

“I have wandered into a land of Amazons,” the earl teased. “And we all know what the Amazon warrior women did to the males they encountered.”

Playing right into his hands, Lady Anne demanded to know what they did.

“Why, they used men for only two things—body strength or seed for propagating the species. In short, slavery and breeding.”

A ripple of dizzy laughter danced and skipped through the small room, and Molly felt the heat rise several degrees. Trust Carver Danforthe to speak of matters that the high-born, unmarried young ladies in that room should know nothing about. Must be in his cups, she thought with a terse sigh, staring hard at her blurred stitches.

“I’m sure Miss Robbins would have made a very fine Amazon queen. See how stern she keeps her countenance, despite all attempts by the lone male present to make her smile. See how savagely she wields her skillful needle, weaving her web. No man would get beyond her gates without capture. He would find himself bound up in her threads.” She felt him moving around her. Very close. “While she decided what to use him for. Slave or mate. Both perhaps.”

“Danforthe, you are the very worst! Stop teasing poor Miss Robbins and let her work.” But even as she admonished him, Lady Anne could not keep the laughter out of her voice, and it rather sounded as if she sweetly corrected the bad habits of a little lapdog, not the saucy words of a rake.

Molly pursed her lips and took back her earlier thoughts regarding Lady Anne’s suitability as his wife. The girl was too young, too giddy to put him in his place. He needed a slap with a rug beater, not a tickle with a feather duster.

“Am I troubling you, Miss Robbins?” he inquired, leaning over her shoulder.

“Certainly not,” she replied crisply.

“There. See?” She heard the sly grin in his voice. “Miss Robbins is not troubled, and she’s the most important Amazon here, I think we can all agree. Without clothes created by the likes of Miss Robbins, you’d all be naked and at severe disadvantage for battle against the intruder in your midst.”

His fingers casually moved the pleats of Molly’s skirt.

Goose bumps rose on the nape of her neck, under the stray wisps of hair that had escaped her topknot. She feared he would see. Oh, she wished someone would throw the rake out. If only Lady Mercy were there, but alas, she was flitting about the countryside, leaving her wicked brother to his own devices. Chaos. Utter chaos.

He was determined to seduce her, it seemed. Each time they met, he wore away at her resistance a little more.

“Are you ready for another?” he asked. His hand moved her skirt again, surreptitiously brushing the thigh beneath.

“What?” She couldn’t think, could barely take a breath.

“Another bead, Miss Robbins.”

“Yes…thank you, your lordship.”

He proceeded to thread another bead onto her needle. “You look flushed, Miss Robbins, and your hand, which I’ve heard described as infamously steady, appears to tremble.”

“The room is overheated.” She accidently met his gaze full on while raising her eyes from Lady Anne’s shoulder. Somehow he held her there, just with the ravenous, demanding intensity of the look he gave her. “And so are you,” she muttered under her breath. “Too hot.”

“Too hot? I am indeed. We can’t all have ice water in our veins, like you.”

The injustice of that remark caused her to stick her needle too far. Lady Anne yelped, and Molly apologized profusely.

“Danforthe, now you have upset Miss Robbins!” Lady Anne cried.

“Nonsense. I am only teasing. Miss Robbins should acquire a sense of humor.”

A few other ladies had now entered the annex room, ostensibly to have hems and sleeves tended to by their own seamstresses and maids, but very probably to see what Danforthe was up to. Molly wondered where the Baroness Schofield might be. She took a step to the side, inching away from his body heat.

Just two more beads, and she’d be done, but Carver was not helping her cause. In the act of passing her a bead, he fumbled and dropped it.

“Oops!” he exclaimed. “I’ll get the blasted thing.” He disappeared in a hasty crouch, while Lady Anne Rothespur joyfully assured him he was a clumsy oaf.

The dressing-room door swung open again, and a blast of much-welcome cooler air swept Molly’s brow. The clipped tones of Carver’s mistress quickly followed the breeze, almost as if her own thoughts had summoned the woman.

“Goodness it is crowded in here. Robbins, for pity’s sake, make haste. You’ve made a dreadful botch-up of this seam. It’s too tight, and I can barely breathe.”

Molly looked for the baroness, but without spectacles, her overworked eyes were slow to see which of the new faces was the one calling to her. She felt the room begin to tip on one side. Had her eyesight worsened in just these last few hours? Or was it merely the heat of the small room and her nerves suffering the pressure of this grand occasion?

“Robbins!” the baroness snapped again. “Are you deaf as well as mute, girl?”

The woman did not care that she was busy with another client. Nor had she seen Carver Danforthe on his hands and knees between skirts, searching for the dropped bead.

A swift hush descended over the room, but if the baroness took note of it at all, she probably assumed they were all in awe at her grand appearance. “I swear you are the slowest, stupidest, most trying seamstress I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter.” She turned to the woman on her right and laughed coldly. “First she tries to drown me in bile yellow, and then stuffs me into a gown that was evidently measured to fit someone else, because she was too lazy to make a new one for me. Thought I wouldn’t notice. I really cannot understand the sudden appeal of this dull, jumped-up lady’s maid. I don’t know why I wasted my money.”

“But you didn’t, did you, Maria?” Carver suddenly stood upright. “It was my money. Or my ancestors’ money, since I’ve never actually earned any.”

Molly thought she would faint. His fingers skimmed her sleeve. She dare not look at him, but kept her gaze on Lady Anne’s white evening glove.

The silence, like the heat, was heavy, suffocating, but no one left the room. This was too interesting now, of course.

***

He saw the spite in Maria’s eyes, glistening like shards of ice forming with unnatural speed over pond weeds.

“You owe Miss Robbins an apology.”

Her pouty, unnaturally red lips parted, and she squeezed out a gasp, part scornful laugh, part sheer outrage. “I most certainly do not. Every word I just said is the truth. She tried to put me in a horrid yellow gown, and I—”

“Enough,” he growled, and the room froze. “Miss Robbins.” He put the last bead into Molly’s hand and watched her fingers gather around it. Standing close to her in that crowded room had a most rousing effect on his body and his senses. There was one particular curl against the nape of her neck that he felt an almost overwhelming urge to kiss. Then he wanted to press the tip of his tongue very lightly to her skin. It was, he supposed, her innocence that drew him in, rejuvenated the lusty spirit in a jaded old rake like him. Pursuit had grown tiresome in recent years, and he was seldom intrigued enough to go to great lengths for a woman. Until the Mouse started scratching at his walls, making her presence known, so he missed her when she was not there.

He liked looking down into her large brown eyes and seeing all the questions spinning and darting about. The ideas swimming through her mind intrigued him.

But hers were the only eyes not watching him now.

“Lady Anne.” He bowed to his friend’s sister. “I will see you when Miss Robbins has put you back together, and we will, I hope, resume our dance.”

“Certainly, your lordship.”

Carver left the room, not looking again at his mistress. He knew she followed him out, her slippered feet rushing along in his wake. “How dare you speak to me as if I’m a child in need of reprimand! And in public!”

Paused at the margin of the dance floor, he spun around to face her. “How dare you speak that way to Miss Margaret Robbins.” Several faces in the crowd looked over at them, forcing Maria to draw herself up, bosom out, earrings dancing with the tremors of her restrained wrath.

“She is a servant,” she hissed, her teeth gritted in a smile as false as the color in her cheeks—a youthful blush he now knew to be the work of carmine rouge. “Perhaps you forget.”

“Yes, I’ve seen how you speak to your servants, Baroness Schofield. It is not how I speak to mine.”

Her eyes flamed, the icicles melting. Soon he suspected she would try tears again. She readied them, like an actress rehearsing her role. “It must run in the Danforthe family, this desire to play below stairs.”

Carver’s hands formed fists at his side, so tightly clenched he almost lost the feeling in them. “I beg your pardon?”

“Just like your sister with her farmyard diversion, you choose to dally with a commoner. I’ve heard that men of a certain age are often drawn to girls like Robbins. It makes them feel as if they have reclaimed their youth, makes them the conquering hero again—looked up to and swooned over by a chit of a girl who owes everything to them. I put up with your other fancies, but now I am supposed to tolerate this perverse dalliance of yours too?”

“By no means would I expect you to
tolerate
anything, Maria,” he replied tightly. “You are welcome to absent yourself from my company any time you desire. That—as I’m sure you can appreciate, having suffered so many years of your husband’s tiresome company—is the beauty of not being bound in matrimony.” He turned away from her and walked through the guests standing around the perimeter of the dancing.

Again she followed. “Robbins is paid for a service. Is it too much to expect a gown I can wear?”

“You seem to be wearing that one.”

“It is much too tight at the bosom. Look.”

Knowing full well what she was up to, he wouldn’t look at her. “Perhaps you have gained weight, Maria. That, so I hear, happens to women of a certain age.”

That silenced her for a while. She deserved that arrow, he thought angrily. Not only for the way she insulted him, but for how she spoke to Margaret.

“And for your information, madam,” he added eventually, “yellow happens to be my favorite color.”

“Well, how was I to know?”

The same way Margaret had known, he thought. By not being absorbed in herself. By taking note. By caring enough to know.

“Are you going to dance with me?” the baroness demanded.

He stared at her. “No,” he said eventually. “You and I have danced our last. I am clearly not the partner you wanted. If you find yourself obliged to tolerate me, I cannot fulfill your needs, and you, madam, cannot fulfill mine.”

Her face was white with fury.

He bowed. “Good evening.”

***

“That was quite a scene,” Lady Anne Rothespur remarked as the two angry people departed. “She’s very brassy. What does he see in her, I wonder?”

Molly threaded the last bead into place. “A beautiful face, an elegant form, and a very full bosom, no doubt,” she muttered drolly.

“Men can be such tedious creatures, easily distracted by bright objects. My brother is just as bad. I’ve decided I shall marry a bookish man who doesn’t care at all for looks. Then he won’t be tempted to run off or keep a mistress.”

“A sound idea, to be sure.”

Lady Anne looked over her shoulder. “What about you, Miss Robbins?”

“Me?”

“Have you no plans to marry? Frederick Dawes told me you ran away from your groom at the altar. Did he have a wandering eye too?”

“I decided to devote myself to a career instead,” Molly replied, jabbing her needle into the pincushion at her wrist. “There is no place for a husband in my life.”

“But you will be an old maid.”

“Yes, thank goodness. A
happy
old maid.”

Lady Anne looked doubtful.

“I am content with my choice,” Molly assured her. “Not every woman is made to be a wife.”

“Jumping Jacks, Miss Robbins! To resign yourself to spinsterhood at your age. It’s a mistake.”

Molly merely smiled.

Suddenly Lady Anne spun around to face her fully, the skirt of her gown fanning out. “I wager you have a secret love.”

“Gracious no.” The more aware she became of the heat in her face the worse it felt; the higher her temperature climbed.

Hands on her waist, the romantically inclined young girl surveyed Molly with sparkling blue eyes. “I always knew there was something about you. Something brewing inside. Carver is right. You have a very devious look about you, Miss Robbins.”

“I assure you there is no man in my life. Not in that sense. Goodness it is hot in here.”

“Perhaps he is promised to another, or there is some other awfully tragic reason why you keep him secret. I suppose you have closed your heart to others because it is reserved only for him, and you will love him unto death.” She placed a gloved finger to her lips. “Is he young or old? Fat or thin? Dark or fair? Are his teeth evenly spaced? Is he good humored? Does he dance with elegance or charge about like a ram in a field of ewes? Does he ride adequately?” Leaning closer, she giggled behind her fan. “Is he ravishingly reckless in the saddle? Does he drink too much port? Does he have horrendously hairy knuckles? I hope, for your sake, he looks well in knee breeches. There is nothing worse than a bandy-kneed beau.”