Teresa Medeiros Page 23

  The bobby ducked his head. “That we do, Your Grace. Got eight of ’em between us, don’t we, Ned?”

  “Aye, Clarence. And a feisty lot they are.”

  Justin divided a wad of pound notes between the two men. “Buy yourselves a round of ale when you get off duty. For your trouble.”

  As the men climbed onto the wagon, still singing the praises of the generous duke, Justin commanded his own driver to take the dog to the stables. Penfeld mopped his brow with Emily’s sash, thankful to be relieved of his monstrous burden. Justin refused to look behind him.

  “Mother, would you please escort Emily to her room?”

  “That won’t be necessary.” Emily’s words rang out in the crisp air.

  He pivoted to face her. She hugged his coat closed at her throat like a queen’s mantle. She wore her dignity well, but not well enough to disguise the stricken look in her eyes—eyes darkened by his casual betrayal.

  “Thank you, but I’m not so young I can’t toddle up the stairs unassisted.” As she brushed past him, a whiff of vanilla tickled his nostrils.

  “If you want to be treated like an adult,” he said softly, “you might try behaving like one.”

  She hesitated, then moved up the shallow stairs into the house, her shoulders set at proud angles.

  “Coming, dear?” his mother crooned as the others filed after Emily, the husbands grumbling and the wives murmuring soothing lullabies.

  Justin jammed his hands deep into his pockets. “Later.”

  Penfeld stood before him, his face folded in miserable lines of defeat. “If you wish to dismiss me, sir, I understand. I’d appreciate a reference, but if you don’t feel I deserve it …”

  Justin sighed as sudden exhaustion overtook him. He felt as if he’d been master of this house for centuries instead of months. “Go ring for a bath, Penfeld.”

  “You wish to bathe at this hour?”

  He straightened the valet’s crooked tie. “Not for me. For you.”

  “Aye, sir! As you wish.” Penfeld bowed his thanks and went scurrying for the house.

  Justin stood alone on the barren stretch of lawn, staring up at Emily’s window until the light fluttered and went out, leaving the glazed pane a square of black. He shivered as from somewhere behind the house came the mournful baying of a dog.

  In the next few days Justin was to regret his cool rebuke. With the stubborn conviction of a woman wronged, Emily became exactly what he had requested.

  She seldom smiled, and if she did, it was a watery imitation of her infectious grin. Lily used an iron to tame her wayward curls to rigid ringlets. The stench of scorched hair hung in the musty air of the house. Millicent taught her to embroider and Edith to bang out Beethoven’s “Minuet in G” on the piano with military precision. She practiced each evening for hours until Justin’s head throbbed from gritting his teeth. Penfeld became her unofficial lady’s maid, pressing her childish pinafores to starched perfection. Her crinolines appeared so stiff that Justin found it a marvel she could sit without them flying up over her face.

  When Justin entered a room she’d make some snippet of conversation about the weather or the dinner party his mother was planning at the end of the week. His sisters would chime in about the upcoming New Year’s ball and he’d be left gazing at the smooth cap of Emily’s head as she bent back to stitching the family crest on his handkerchiefs with slavish devotion.

  She was a perfect lady.

  Justin hated her.

  He couldn’t decide who he despised more—this new Emily or himself. Unable to bear this pale shadow of his vibrant Emily, he shut himself in the study, immersing himself in Winthrop Shipping business with an enthusiasm that made his father seem a rakish wastrel. He glared at reports until his vision blurred. His insomnia returned with savage force, but even pounding the piano until dawn did not ease it. His temper flared without provocation, and the servants scurried to avoid him. They whispered among themselves that it was as if the gruff ghost of Frank Connor had returned to stalk the halls of Grymwilde.

  Armed with a tumbler of his father’s Scotch, Justin emerged from the study one evening. He veered away from the smoking room where the men had retired for brandy and cigars. Last night he had severed himself from their company and reduced poor Harvey to nervous snivels by snapping that he ought to consider seeking a job instead of living off his wife’s dowry like a spineless slug.

  As he passed the parlor, the siren song of badly struck piano keys and feminine chatter lured him in. He knew his brooding presence made his sisters nervous. Edith and his mother lapsed to whispers. Millicent hummed under her breath while Lily’s trembling fingers dropped stitches all over the place. Only Emily seemed undisturbed by his crude intrusion. She continued her graceless thumping on the spinet.

  Even Emily’s bulldog seemed drained of spirit. He lolled on the rug at Emily’s feet, his massive head stretched out on his paws and his spiked collar replaced by a garish pink bow. As Justin sank into the chair beside the piano, the dog rose and slunk out the door.

  Justin leaned back in the chair, nursing his Scotch and eyeing Emily through narrowed eyes. She sat in a luminous halo of lamplight, her skirts spread in a perfect bell around the piano bench. Her piquant face glowed with serenity. Justin shifted his weight and rolled the amber liquid in the bottom of his glass. He had done in one careless night what Miss Winters had failed to do in seven years—made a lady out of Emily Claire Scarborough. So why did he want to yank her up by her ridiculous ringlets and demand some show of spirit?

  Emily could feel Justin’s smoldering gaze on her, but she willed her fingers to continue their mechanical pounding, knowing she was slowly driving him insane. The fact that she’d just ripped out his initials and sewn Homer onto all of his handkerchiefs inspired her to continue.

  She stole a look at him from beneath the shelter of her lashes. Her heart skipped in her throat. In the mere space of days he had descended from mildly rakish to barbarous. His jaw was shadowed, his thick hair tousled. His waistcoat was rumpled and his white shirt lay open at the throat. Emily remembered only too well the feel of him beneath her fingers. With his long legs stretched out before him and his eyes glittering beneath the ebony silk of his lashes, he didn’t look the sort of gentleman to seduce his ward. He looked the sort to ravish her.

  Emily experimented by striking an off-key chord. A muscle in his jaw twitched dangerously. She hid her smile behind a frown of concentration. As she finished the minuet, his shoulders slumped and he tossed back the rest of the Scotch in a relieved swig. Shooting him a sly glance, she hooked her fingers and started at the beginning again.

  Justin choked. He shot out of the chair, his face darkened with emotion. “For God’s sake, woman! You’re not some wind-up monkey beating a drum. Must you play like one?”

  Emily froze, her fingers poised over the keys.

  His sisters gaped at him in open-mouthed shock. They had seen their brother frustrated, morose, angry, elated, and white-faced with shame beneath his father’s taunts, but they’d never seen him show deliberate cruelty to anyone.

  His breath seared the back of her neck as he folded his hands over hers, forcing them out of their rigid stance.

  “Loosen your fingers,” he commanded. “Stop clawing the keys like a bloody cat.”

  He massaged each of her knuckles until her hands went limp in his rough embrace. “There. Can you feel the difference?”

  “Yes,” she murmured. “I can feel it.”

  She could feel other things as well. The press of his muscled thigh against her back. The whisper of his breath against her cheek, its Scotch-warmed fragrance as intoxicating as fresh sin. She gazed down at their linked hands. His knuckles had yet to lose their island tan.

  She could also feel his fingers on top of hers, stroking them toward the waiting keys. A shimmering chord vibrated on the air.

  “That’s it,” he said, his voice softening to husky velvet. “Don’t attack the keys. Stroke them. Possess
them. Make them your own.”

  He reversed their positions, slipping his hands beneath hers until they rested lightly in the cup of her palms. Her hands looked pale and delicate against the swarthiness of his own. He began the piece, not merely playing the keys but seducing them with his touch. She could feel the music reverberating through his powerful tendons. She turned her head to watch his face, captivated by the play of emotions over his handsome features.

  “Music isn’t like sewing, Emily. It’s feeling and not skill that separates mastery from mechanics. Listen to this piece. It’s deceptively simple. But hear it as Mozart did. See the dancers twirling around the ballroom. See two lovers meet and touch hands.”

  The final note chimed with the crystalline purity of a bell. Their gazes locked in its echo.

  Justin felt his breath quicken. Emily smelled like burnt vanilla and her ringlets made her look like a forlorn cocker spaniel, but all he wanted to do was graze his lips against the creamy flesh of her throat and sink his teeth into the inviting fullness of her lower lip.

  She gazed up at him, her eyes wide and guileless. “Like this?”

  She slipped her hands beneath his and played the piece with the flawless accuracy of any schoolgirl accustomed to a music teacher rapping her knuckles for each error.

  Justin straightened. His voice sounded tight, as if something were caught in his throat. “Yes. That will do very nicely.”

  As he spun on his heel and marched out of the room, Olivia Connor buried her face in her embroidery, her plump ringlets dancing with amusement.

  The next day Emily ducked into the kitchen, seeking an escape from Lily. Justin’s sister had devised some gruesome new coiffure for that night’s dinner party, and had been trailing her for hours, brandishing an iron and some alarming tongs that looked better suited for shoeing horses. She doubted if any of Justin’s sisters even knew the kitchen had been moved out of the basement in recent years. They seemed to be caught in a web of perpetual girlhood. Emily thought Justin ought to boot both them and their shiftless husbands out of Grymwilde to start homes and families of their own.

  The kitchen was in an uproar. Cooks and maids scurried from oven to table, their aprons streaked with flour and their faces flushed from heat and exertion. Damp tendrils of hair escaped their crooked caps. Gracie, the toothless old cook, hovered over an enameled caldron, stirring and muttering under her breath like one of Macbeth’s witches. The salty tang of mussel chowder hung in the air.

  As Emily sidled around the coal box, Gracie cocked her bulbous nose and sniffed the air. “Check the buns, Sally. I smell somethin’ burnin’.”

  Emily sighed and blew a singed ringlet out of her eyes.

  Gracie’s pink gums cracked in a smile. “Never mind, Sal. It’s only Miss Emily. And how are ya today, my dear? Come to pilfer another o’ my raisin buns, have ya?”

  “Not today, Gracie. I just came in to … warm myself.”

  It was true there was little enough warmth in the drafty old house. The fire in Justin’s eyes had been banked to an unnatural coolness that made her shiver.

  One of the maids burst into tears over a pan of clotted-cream sauce and Gracie bustled over to comfort her. Emily wandered down the long galley, hoping to alleviate her boredom by peering into this pan or that one. At the sight on one of the tables she let out a cry of dismay.

  “Can’t cook those till it’s time to serve ’em,” one of the maids explained, brushing past with a tray of steaming buns. “The duchess likes ’em nice and fresh.”

  Emily knelt and rested her folded arms on the table, bringing herself eye to eye with a glass tank of live lobsters. Pity touched her at the sight of their shiny claws bound by thick twine. They looked helpless and trapped. Just like her. She imagined her own arms hobbled by ruffles, her legs by crinolines.

  She cocked her head sideways, studying the lobsters. Did they dream of the sea as she did? Did they hear its haunting rhythms? Taste its pungent tang?

  At least the lobsters did not wake in the night, dreaming of a man garbed not in a crisp waistcoat and trousers, but a pair of faded dungarees. They never ached to remember his dark hair tousled by the wind, his stern features softened by laughter. She reached into the water and stroked a sleek head, surprised by the burn of tears in her eyes.

  “There you are, Em!” Lily’s shrill tones grated down her spine. “I’ve found the most enchanting coif in this magazine. Do you think Gracie might give us some egg whites to stiffen your curls?”

  Groaning, Emily dropped her head. The lobsters’ stalked eyes seemed to glint with sympathy.

  “I won’t go. I’m not hungry,” Emily repeated, digging her nails into the polished oak of the door frame.

  “Of course you’ll go,” Lily chirped, prying her free and dragging her another ten feet. “Mama wouldn’t tolerate your not making an appearance. She’s hoping you’ll make some friends among girls of your own sort.”

  “Girls with birds’ nests on their heads?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Your hair looks charming.”

  Emily caught her reflection in a console glass as they passed. Her ringlets had been swept up and stiffened with an alarming mixture of egg white and starch. She ducked under a gasolier, afraid her hair might ignite if touched.

  She dug her heels into the carpet, but Lily jerked her onward. The frail-looking creature must have inherited her mother’s muscle tone if not her fortitude, Emily thought. “Do hurry,” she commanded. “Mama will be cranky if we’re late.”

  Emily entered the long dining room in dread. An awkward silence fell over the gathering. She could see only a blur of seated guests, all of them staring fixedly at her head. She jerked her hand out of Lily’s, wanting desperately to slither beneath the Brussels carpet.

  At the far head of the table sat Justin, riveting in his black tailcoat and silk revers. The startling white of his shirt and bow tie drew out the bronze lingering in his skin. His gaze flicked to her for the briefest moment, and she lowered her eyes, fearful of revealing a hunger that had little to do with the succulent aromas wafting from the serving dishes.

  A silvery peal of laughter broke the silence. Emily jerked her head up as a helpless shudder of remembered distaste rippled down her spine.

  Seated next to Justin, her icy blond hair the perfect complement to his dark head, was the former toast of Foxworth Seminary and the bane of Emily’s existence—Cecille du Pardieu.

  Chapter 22

  Too soon, the day will come when you take your heart away from your daddy and give it to another.…

  Emily slunk to her chair beneath the curious stares of Harvey and Herbert. Harold was too busy slurping his chowder to notice her. As she sank down, she stole a look at her old nemesis. Cecille looked as prim and elegant as a Dresden statuette in a froth of silver-gray silk trimmed in tiny blue roses. Her hair was knotted in a stark chignon. Loose tendrils softened the heart-shaped angles of her face.

  Emily smoothed the stiff ruffles of her bodice, wondering if anyone would notice if she sawed them off with her knife. Compared to Cecille’s polished sophistication, she felt like an overgrown six-year-old. As Cecille draped her graceful fingers over Justin’s arm, Emily’s hand tightened around the ivory hilt of her spoon.

  A test. She must simply think of this as her trial by fire. She had practically bitten off her tongue in the past week to maintain the image of the perfect young lady. If she survived tonight, Justin would be forced to see her as a woman, not a child.

  “So nice of you to join us, Emily,” the duchess brayed. “I should like to introduce you to the Comtesse Guermond and her charming daughter—”

  “We’ve met,” Emily mumbled into her chowder.

  “I’m sure I don’t remember,” the countess said. She was a tiny creature swathed in lace who chirped rather than talked.

  “Mama,” Cecille drawled in the French fashion, “Miss Scarborough is that poor dear creature they were discussing at Baroness Gutwild’s last week. The one who sp
ent all of those dreary years working at Foxworth’s.”

  Justin laid down his spoon and pushed back his chowder bowl.

  Even Harold stopped slurping as she continued, her blue eyes sparkling with malice. “Quite an industrious little thing, too. You used to give my boots a good polish, didn’t you, darling?”

  Emily swallowed, remembering Cecille’s shrieks at finding a dead mouse stuffed in the patent leather toe of her brand new jemimas.

  She grinned sweetly. “Every chance I got.”

  Cecille’s eyes narrowed, but she recovered by fixing Justin with an adoring gaze. Emily’s stomach churned.

  “You must realize, Your Grace, that you are the gossip of every salon in London. It was so benevolent of you to open your heart and home to an unfortunate orphan in this Christmas season. There’s even talk of organizing a society in your name to help rescue other”—she cast Emily a sly glance—“urchins.”

  Justin met Emily’s gaze, his eyes somber beneath the muted glow of the gasoliers. “It was the least I could do.”

  “Yes, it was,” Emily replied, tilting her goblet to her lips. “The very least.”

  She almost choked as the rich, sweet liquid flowed down her throat. Milk, she realized. Crystalline droplets of wine sparkled on Cecille’s pink lips. Emily wiped her upper lip with her napkin, praying she didn’t have a foamy mustache to rival Herbert’s.

  Justin had given her milk just like some babe. She set down the goblet with a deceptively mild thump and fixed Cecille with her most innocent gaze. “My guardian has been the very soul of benevolence.” She shifted her gaze to Justin. “Haven’t you, Daddy?”

  Justin’s head snapped up. His eyes darkened in warning.

  “So what do you all think about those pesky Zulus?” Herbert offered, obviously hoping to steer the conversation in a safer direction.

  “Shut up, Herbert,” Millicent and Edith snapped in unison.

  Emily dipped her spoon in her chowder. Justin’s gaze dropped to her lips. “His Grace likes it when I call him daddy” she announced.