The Earl's Mistress (7 page)

“So I’m her last-ditch effort?” Isabella lifted her gaze from the paper. “Is that why she didn’t bother to meet me?”

“Count yourself fortunate,” said Lady Petershaw with a sniff. “Louisa Litner is decidedly common.”

“Then I wonder any gentleman acknowledges her?”

Lady Petershaw had paced back to the window to glance down at the waiting carriages. “I wonder a little, too,” she said pensively, “so I’ve decided on an insurance plan.”

“An insurance plan?” echoed Isabella.

“I’m sending you in my unmarked carriage,” Lady Petershaw said, pointing at the plainer of two carriages parked on the grassy verge. “My under-coachman will drive you. Dillon’s a clever lad. I’ve instructed him to remain nearby for a fortnight.”

“Yes? To what end?”

“I’m of the opinion that Mowbrey is an assumed name,” said the marchioness, “one taken merely for discretion’s sake, I hope.”

“An assumed name?”

The marchioness shrugged. “It’s a common ruse when a well-known gentleman is scouting about for a new mistress,” she said, “but it makes my scrutiny difficult. So if you find the gentleman acceptable, kindly hang a handkerchief out your window each evening. Just a few inches will do. It is but a small lodge in the countryside; there cannot be too many windows.”

“I expect not,” Isabella agreed. “But why?”

“If no handkerchief appears on a given night, Dillon will come to collect you the next morning,” the marchioness answered evenly. “He’s to say there’s been a death in your family—we could do nicely without Lady Meredith, could we not?—and you’re wanted immediately.”

“How extraordinary,” murmured Isabella.

“One cannot be too careful in such matters,” said the marchioness knowingly. “If Dillon is given any nonsense, the next face Mr. Mowbrey will see shall be mine.”

A silence fell across the shabby parlor, punctuated only by the clatter of bare branches beyond the window. “My lady,” Isabella finally said, “why are you doing all this for me?”

The marchioness flashed a wincing smile. “If I do not help you establish yourself, you’ll do it anyway, my dear, and make a hash of it,” she said. “And yet, if I get you into it, I feel it falls to me to get you out again. Moreover, I deeply dislike seeing intelligent women forced into poverty through the vindictiveness of men.”

“Lady Petershaw, my problems with Cousin Everett—the current Baron Tafford, I mean—are my own.”

The lady shrugged, then patted Isabella’s hand. “Now, you will write to me as soon as you have judged the man sane,” she reminded her. “If I’ve had no letter in that first fortnight, I will assume the worst—handkerchief or no.”

Isabella nodded. “In which case I can again expect my aunt’s demise?”

“Followed by my visit if you don’t turn up on my doorstep the next day,” Lady Petershaw added.

“Thank you,” said Isabella, bowing her head.

The marchioness flicked a glance at the clock on the mantelpiece. “I thought you should leave at once,” she said, “before dread sets in. Your trunks are already loaded—the brown one was full of books—and I assume you’ve a portmanteau?”

Isabella did, now filled with garments of lace, and even a bottle of perfume she would otherwise never have dared purchase. But the tools of her trade were no longer books and chalk, Isabella considered, but something altogether different.

“There’s little point burdening your horses with the brown trunk,” she said quietly. “Where I go now, I shall scarcely need schoolbooks.”

“No,” said the marchioness a little somberly. “No, you will not.”

Then she went to the front door, threw it open, and shouted at Dillon. “Bring in the brown one,” she commanded, “and carry it upstairs.”

Isabella gave a long, inward sigh.

Her journey into darkness had just begun.

CHAPTER
5

M
r. Mowbrey’s rural lodge lay in a long, low wood a few miles northwest of Chesham, approached by means of a carriage drive lined by fieldstone walls to either side. Isabella looked about, disconcerted by how deep in the countryside they were.

Along the wall, the trees seemed to bow almost formally toward one another, forming a skeletal canopy of gray that would have been beautiful in the summer but now looked merely bleak. The lane was rutted, the center tufted with frostbitten grass, giving one the impression the road was rarely used. Isabella hung on to the strap, craning this way and that in hope of seeing some sign of civilization.

But there was nothing until, after some two miles, a clearing came suddenly into view and the lane simply ended. She looked out to see a pretty Georgian manor of red brick with an arbor arching over the front door.

The façade was nearly covered in creeper, now dormant, and the windows and doors were freshly painted white, yet the house still held an air of abandonment. The wide stone wall encircled the whole of it, separating the carriage drive from the house itself, as if visitors were being walled out.

Or as if the people inside were being walled in. . . .

With legs that shook, Isabella climbed down, told Dillon to stay put, then pushed open the wrought-iron gate and went up the path to the door. She could hear a hammer ringing in the back of the house, the sound like metal on stone, rhythmically cleaving the silence. She lifted the ornate brass knocker and knocked, but there was no response.

After a second attempt, Isabella simply lifted her skirts and waded into the garden, her footsteps crunching on the stubbled, almost frozen, grass. She wished desperately to get through these first awkward minutes and to reassure herself that Mr. Mowbrey was not a murderous ogre before Dillon abandoned her to her fate.

In the rear, another pretty gate gave onto a graveled yard with a coach house and stable block. Here, however, a section of wall had collapsed, leaving the gate listing drunkenly. A man was chipping away at a piece of fieldstone set on an old mounting block, swinging his arm with a rhythmic expertise and sending chunks of gray flying.

He was bare to the waist, Isabella realized, his leather braces having been slipped off his shoulders to hang loose about a pair of lean hips. A blindingly white shirt had been tossed over a nearby branch, and the man seemed intent upon his work, his muscles bunching thickly as he swung his hammer in cadent, cracking blows.

Despite the cool air and the late winter sun, the man’s broad back was lightly sheened with sweat, and Isabella watched in mute discomposure for some seconds—long enough, apparently, for the man to finish his work. He laid the hammer aside with a grunt, then hefted up the stone and turned.

Recognition slammed into Isabella, seizing her breath.

It was the Earl of Hepplewood.

She froze, gaping at his tall, rangy form that no longer looked so elegant.

Indeed, absent the civilizing effects of a coat and neckcloth—not to mention a shirt—the man looked shockingly barbaric.

Then, to her acute discomfort, he smiled and set the rock back down.

“Mrs. Aldridge,” he said, snatching his shirt from the branch. “Welcome to Greenwood Farm. You’re a trifle early. I shall take it as a sign of eagerness.”

Isabella stepped backward. “Eagerness?” she parroted, her eyes fixated upon a broad expanse of bare chest.

Hepplewood moved with a languid grace, shaking out his shirt as he came. “I was glad to learn you’d taken my good advice,” he said, shoving an arm in a sleeve, “but the coincidence of the thing did take me aback—as it has you, too, I see.”

But Isabella couldn’t begin to make sense of it; her brain felt stuffed with wool and her lungs had ceased to work. Hepplewood dragged the shirt on, his chest wall rippling as he drew it down his lithe, smoothly muscled torso.

Somehow, she forced her gaze to his face, resisting the urge to run back to the carriage. “I beg your pardon,” she said again, blinking slowly, “but
what
are you talking about?”

He propped one hand on the gatepost that still stood upright, his gaze sweeping her length. “My advice,” he said with a faint smile, “to give up the dull business of governessing for an option that better suits your . . . well, let us call them your God-given attributes.”

Indignation welled up inside Isabella. “How dare you,” she said quietly. “I do not know, Lord Hepplewood, just what sort of deceit you employed to trick me here, but I will have—”

“Mrs. Aldridge,” he interjected, his eyes flashing dangerously as he came around the gatepost. “I should very much like the two of us to get on, but
deceit
and
trickery
are not insults I’ll tolerate.” He set a large, very firm hand on her forearm. “Do we understand one another?”

But the word
coincidence
was slowly seeping into her consciousness.

“Surely you don’t mean to claim—” Isabella cut off her words and tried to draw back. “Surely you aren’t suggesting this is purely—”

“Accidental?” He gave an odd half smile. “Little in life is. I saw a woman I wished to bed, but alas, she declined. Still, women, to my mind, are very nearly interchangeable. It was no great inconvenience to ask the resourceful Mrs. Litner to find me another raven-haired, violet-eyed beauty willing to slake my lust. Imagine my surprise when she wrote that I should expect
you
.”

“Dear God.” Isabella tried to back away, but the hand on her arm did not relent. “I don’t believe it.”

“Mrs. Aldridge,” he murmured, his eyes roaming over her face, “you approached Louisa Litner with every intention of marketing yourself in just the fashion I suggested. And she has sent you to—well, let’s be blunt—to charm and to flirt and to almost certainly warm the bed of one Mr. William Mowbrey, a gentleman of very specific tastes. What can it possibly matter to you that I have turned out to be Mowbrey?”

“I . . . I don’t know.” Isabella tried to think. “It just does.”

“Does it?” His voice dropped, his eyes suddenly heavy. “My dear, you intrigue me.”

“I don’t wish to intrigue you,” she managed, setting a hand against his chest. “I want n-nothing to do with you.”

But she knew it wasn’t true; not entirely. More than once during the long drive from London, she had remembered their almost-kiss and wondered what this man next would be like. Would his eyes flash with fire? Would his touch singe her through her clothes?

Oh, yes. It would.

And she, apparently, was an idiot.

Hepplewood had caught her chin and was holding it none too gently. “No, Mrs. Aldridge, I was not mistaken in you,” he murmured, his voice thickening. “You are a stunning creature—and very much in need, I think, of being tamed.”

Isabella had the sense of slipping over a mossy cliff; as if she were falling, her stomach bottoming out. His mouth was nearly over hers, his intent plain, and she would not escape it a second time.

“Just a taste, my dear,” the earl murmured, his lashes lowering. “Yes, merely that—for
now
.”

Isabella knew she should run; that to kiss him would be surrendering something of herself. But her feet were frozen, his grip relentless.

Hepplewood pulled her hard against him, surrounding her in the scent of male sweat and something even more primitive. He settled his lips over hers, gently at first, and Isabella let escape a faint whimper.

The sound elicited a deep groan, and Hepplewood opened his mouth over hers, thrusting deep on the first stroke. Blood seemed to well up, roaring in her ears, and it was as if the garden and the world around them spun away.

His heat and the overpowering weight of his body surrounded Isabella. Sliding his tongue deep, the earl drew her firmly against him, one hand settling boldly on her hip, urging her against him as he thrust.

Isabella had been kissed, but she’d known nothing like this. It was raw and vulgar and wonderfully knee-weakening; a rush of hot desire that threatened to swamp her. His fingers, she dimly realized, no longer held her arm but had instead plunged into the hair at her nape, forcing her to hold still. His left hand was cupped beneath her hip, lifting her slightly against his groin as her will went weak with a longing that frightened her.

The tip of his tongue stroked the roof of her mouth in the lightest, most erotic of caresses. Inexplicably, the raw hunger it engendered jerked Isabella from her confusion. She wedged both hands flat against his chest and shoved.

To her shock, he stopped, lifting his lips an inch, his eyes still heavy with desire. His mouth, which she would have called thin and a little cruel, now looked soft, his bottom lip faintly swollen.

Something like lust went shivering through her.

“Isabella,” he said huskily. “It’s Isabella, yes—?”

She nodded.

“Isabella, I want you beneath me,” he rasped. “In my bed.”

“In your bed?” Isabella echoed witlessly.

“Or wherever you prefer,” he amended, his voice dropping.

Isabella’s eyes flew wide. “I cannot,” she said, this time jerking free of his grip. “Not in Northumbria. And not here.”

He did not follow her but watched her warily instead. He had wicked eyes that glittered like shards of blue ice.

“I’m sorry.” She forced down a hard swallow and shook her head. “I’ve made a foolish, foolish mistake.”

But her foolish mistake, Isabella knew, had more to do with what she did want than with what she did not.

She wanted him.
A man who was dangerous, demanding, and, unless she missed her guess, a little cruel. And she wondered, fleetingly, if she had lost her mind. If something inside her was simply not . . .
normal
.

“Made a mistake, have you?” he murmured. “I certainly haven’t. I find you more desirable now, my dear, than ever. And though you don’t like me a great deal, you
do
want me.”

“How very confident you are,” she whispered.

“But not, I think, overconfident,” he replied, studying her. “Your eyes are wide, your lips damp and slightly parted. Your gaze—and a moment ago, your hands—were drifting in directions that, strictly speaking, a lady’s do not.”

Isabella could only stare. She wanted to slap him again, but she had the most frightful realization that what he said was true; that her hands had slid down his shoulders and back, and that this time she’d even caressed—