Читать книгу Regency High Society Vol 2: Sparhawk's Lady / The Earl's Intended Wife / Lord Calthorpe's Promise / The Society Catch - Louise Allen, Miranda Jarrett - Страница 7

April 1803

He would not be afraid.

Jeremiah took a deep breath and rested his hand over the open top of the lantern’s globe, sealing the candle and its flame within beneath his palm. As the air was exhausted, the flame slowly began to flicker and dim, and the shadows in the bedchamber grew darker, deeper, closing in on Jeremiah as the small light faded. He could feel his heart pounding in his breast, his blood racing, every muscle tensing to run and escape the blind, irrational panic that was swallowing him as completely as the night itself. The little flame twisted one final time and guttered out, leaving only the smoking spark on the wick and the endless, silent, eternal blackness.

With a choking sound deep in his throat, Jeremiah lifted his hand, his eyes desperately intent on the tiny glowing spark. His breath tight in his chest, he willed it back to life, struggling to concentrate on this last dot of light as the only way to fight the blind terror that would smother his life if he let it.

Come back. Damnation, come back! Don’t die and leave me alone in the night!

God, why had he let it go so far?

Slowly, as if it heard him, the spark glowed brighter, stronger, until at last it became a flame again, dancing double in the curved globe. Still Jeremiah stared at it, unable to look away. For now the shadows were gone, the demons vanquished. But how long would they stay away, how long before he found any lasting peace? With a groan of despair he dropped back onto the bed, his arms thrown across the pillows beneath his head.

What the devil had happened to him? It hadn’t always been this way. He was a Yankee, a Rhode Islander by birth, nobody’s fool, a deep-water captain raised on the Narragansett. The first time he’d fought for his life he’d been only eleven, beside his privateering father in the War for Independence, and through two more wars he’d never turned his back on a fight, whether with swords or pistols or his own bare fists.

He’d battle hurricanes at sea or thieves and rogues on land. Who or what made little difference to him, as long as he won. His temper was notorious, his courage undoubted. He stood over six feet tall with shoulders to match, and years of hard living had made his body equally hard, scarred, lean and muscular.

No one who knew him would ever call him a coward. No one would dare. But he himself knew the truth.

He, Captain Jeremiah Sparhawk, was afraid of the dark.

He stared up at the pleated damask canopy overhead, still struggling with the terror. He was safe here, safe in his sister Desire’s great house on the hill outside of Portsmouth. She was a fine lady now, his sister, married to an English nobleman, Rear Admiral Lord John Herendon. If Jeremiah listened he could just make out the sound of their guests in the music room below, the laughter and merriment that he’d wanted no part of this evening, or any other since he’d been brought here four months ago. Yet Desire had welcomed him when he’d needed a haven, sat by his bedside when the pain and fever had threatened his sanity, and not once had she questioned him when he’d begged to leave the lantern lit at night.

That other night there’d been no moon, no stars, nothing to mark where the midnight sky met the sea. The hot wind that carried the Chanticleer eastward across the Mediterranean had strangely died at sunset, and with the ship becalmed, the men on watch had grown drowsy, lulled to complacency by the warm air and the gentle slapping of the water against the hull.

But he was their captain. If they erred, the fault and the blame was his alone. He should have sensed the danger before it was too late, before the devil was there on his chest with the cold, curved blade pressed tight into his throat.…

He woke with a ragged cry, soaked with his own sweat, and instinctively lunged for the pistol he kept beneath his pillow. Clutching the gun in both hands, he rolled over onto his back, ready to challenge the demon that dared follow him here into the light.

“Forgive me if I startled you, Captain Sparhawk,” said the woman standing beside the bed, “but you can lay that pistol down. At least you won’t need it on my account.”

Still not sure if he was dreaming, Jeremiah stared at her with the gun gripped tightly in his hands.

“Please,” she said gently. “I promise I’m no threat.”

She didn’t look like any nightmare he recognized. Far from it. She was so beautiful it almost hurt him to look at her, dressed all in white, from the egret’s plumes in her blond hair to the toes of her white satin slippers. If no devil, then an angel?

But heaven’s angels were neither male nor female, and the way the white silk of her gown spilled over the full curves of this one’s body left little doubt that she was decidedly female, decidedly of this earth. Her mouth was full and very red, her eyes very blue, widely set and tipped up at the corners. She watched him evenly, not at all embarrassed that he wore trousers and nothing else, waiting for him without any sign of fear.

Fear. Dear God, had she been here long enough to hear him cry out against the dark like a terrified child?

He uncocked the pistol and lowered it slowly, that gentleness in her voice making him wary. He didn’t want sympathy or pity, especially not from a woman he didn’t know. “How did you get in here?”

“The customary way.” Now that he’d put the gun down, she stepped closer to him, the diamonds on her bracelets glittering in the light of the single candle. “Through the door.”

He cursed himself mentally for forgetting to lock it. Was he getting so old that he’d already turned careless? “Then you can damned well leave the same way you came. Clear off, and leave me alone.”

She shook her head solemnly, the white feather in her hair brushing against the curtains of the bed. She was near enough now that he could smell her scent, jasmine and musk, and in spite of his wish to be left alone, he felt his gaze drawn inexorably to the soft, full curves of her breasts above the white satin. It didn’t make any sense. Why was she here, so beautifully available? He hadn’t had a woman since they’d brought him back to England, and his body was reminding him, a bit too obviously, that he’d recuperated long enough.

“Ma’am.” Consciously he forced his eyes back up to hers. Beautiful or not, he didn’t need the kind of entanglement she’d bring, not now when his life was in such a shambles. “Look here. Where I come from, ma’am, a lady doesn’t visit a man’s bedchamber unless she’s blessed sure of her invitation. If she comes prowling around on her own, then she’s generally something less than a lady. Now will you take yourself back downstairs with the others, or am I going to have to haul you down myself, for all the world to remark?”

Suddenly imperious, she lifted her chin a fraction higher, and he saw now that she was older than he’d first thought, no young girl dabbling at flirtation. “You shouldn’t address me so familiarly. I am the Countess of Byfield.”

“Well, hell.” He scowled at her, unable and unwilling to recall his sister’s careful coaching on English titles and forms of address. “I’m Captain Sparhawk of Providence, and by my lights that’s considerably more impressive. At least I earned my title.”

“So did I.” She smiled with an open charm he hadn’t expected, her lips curving upward like her tip-tilted eyes. “Forgive me. I forgot that you’re an American, and that a countess would be an anathema to you. Perhaps we’ll do better if you simply call me Caro.”

“I’m not going to call you anything.” He grunted, wishing she didn’t use hundred-guinea words like anathema. “I’m tired, and I want to go to sleep. I’ll just say goodnight and then you go on back down to my sister and the rest of your friends.”

“But they’re not my friends.” Impulsively she sat on the edge of his bed and leaned toward his hand, her blue eyes searching his face. “I don’t go out much, you see, and I’ve never met your sister. It’s you that’s drawn me here, Captain Sparhawk, you alone, and now that I’ve found you I’ve no intention of leaving quite yet.”

“I’ve drawn you here?” he repeated softly, staring at her parted lips so near to his own. Her gloved hand brushed against his hand, just enough to make the hair on his arm tingle with anticipation. “A craggy old Yankee shipmaster with white in his hair?”

She smiled again with the same openness. “You’re not so very old, Captain, and I’m not so very young. Together, I think, we could find some common ground to share.”

Her fragrance was like a drug to his senses, filling them so completely he could almost taste her already. He knew she expected him to kiss her. When he’d been younger, it had happened to him all the time. Barmaids or countesses, women generally made their wishes felt the same way. It would be so easy to draw her into his arms and beneath the sheets, to lose himself in the soft, willing pleasure she was offering.

So easy, and so wrong. Just because he’d been careless enough to let her into his room through that unlocked door didn’t mean she deserved a place in his life, however fleeting, or even one in his bed.

Purposefully he shifted away from her, focusing instead on sliding the pistol back beneath his pillow. “It’s late, ma’am. Good night.”

He heard her sigh, and felt the mattress lighten as she rose to her feet. “Jack warned me you’d be like this,” she said sadly. “But I thought at least you’d be willing—”

“Willing for what?” demanded Jeremiah. With humiliating clarity the answer came to him. His brother-in-law was so hopelessly besotted with Desire that he believed love alone could cure every other man’s ills, as well. How many times before this had Jack urged him to find a ladylove of his own? “So help me, if Herendon put you up to this—”

She turned sharply. “Whatever are you saying?”

“You know damned well what I’m saying! What did Jack tell you of poor old ailing Jeremiah? Did he tell you I was so lonely that I’d welcome the attentions of a woman, any woman, who showed a breath of interest in me?”

By the light of the single candle her eyes flashed bright as her diamonds. “What he told me was that you were proud and hot tempered, but oh my, I never dreamed he meant this!”

“But you came anyway, didn’t you?” Shoving himself from the bed to stand, Jeremiah saw how her eyes widened at his size as he loomed over her, how she stared at the jagged new scar that sliced across his torso. “Was I that much of a curiosity, a foreigner, an American, that I seemed worth the effort of seduction?”

“Seduction!” She tipped back her head and her laughter rippled merrily from her lips. “You think I came here to seduce you?”

He was in no mood for teasing, and he never liked being laughed at, especially not by a woman this pretty. “Aye, what other reason could there be for you creeping in here while I slept, every bit as bold as any barkeep’s daughter?”

“You left me no choice.” With her head cocked, she looked at him shrewdly. “You never leave this house. How else was I to find you?”

“You found me well enough in my bed, didn’t you?”

“You really do believe I came to seduce you,” she said incredulously, lifting her gaze to meet his. “Lord, I wouldn’t know how to begin.”

“Like this.” He rocked her back off her feet and into the crook of his arm before she could protest. He swallowed her startled little cry into his mouth, his lips moving deftly over hers. He would show her that he wasn’t some laughable American savage. He’d prove to her that he didn’t need her pity, or her curiosity, or whatever other contemptuous impulse had brought her here tonight. She tasted every bit as sweet as he’d hoped she’d be, soft and warm in his embrace, and with a low groan he slid his hands along the satin, down her back to settle on the curve between her waist and hip.

Yet for a woman brazen enough to chase him to his bed, she seemed oddly uncertain. She lay stiffly in his arms, her hands curled defensively against his chest, and though her lips had parted for his, she waited for him to lead her. Were English gentlemen so self-centered that they left their women as unschooled as this one so obviously was?

With a new gentleness he deepened the kiss, exploring the most sensitive corners of her mouth until she began to answer him, tentatively at first and then with growing ardor. Her hands crept up his chest and around his neck to draw him closer, and, charmed by the ingenuity of her response, he felt his anger melting away, replaced by an intense bolt of desire. Lord, it had been too long! Countess or not, perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to take what she offered. He lifted her against him and she moaned deep in her throat, and he knew then she wanted him as much as he did her.

And then she jerked free and slapped him as hard as she could.

He stared at her, his cheek stinging where she’d struck him. “What the devil was that for?”

“You—we shouldn’t have kissed like that,” she said breathlessly. Her face was flushed, her lips still wet from their kiss, her hair disheveled and her plume cocked to one side. “It wasn’t right.”

“It seemed right as rain to me.” Strange how he wasn’t really angry with her. Disappointed, yes, but not angry.

“No, you don’t understand.” She lowered her gaze, her clasped hands twisting together. “You don’t understand at all.”

“You’ve called it well enough there.” He sat heavily on the edge of the bed, still rubbing his face. She’d caught him on the jaw with the edge of one of her bracelets, and he knew he’d have a bruise in the morning. “You’re not making much sense, sweetheart.”

“I don’t, not when I’m distraught.” She fidgeted with the clasp on one bracelet as she struggled to regain control of her emotions. “Frederick says it’s one of my greatest failings, and he has worked quite hard to rid me of it.”

Though Jeremiah waited for her to explain who Frederick was, she didn’t. Her husband, most likely. If she was a countess, then somewhere there had to be a count—no, an earl. But whoever Frederick was, Jeremiah would be damned before he’d ask.

“Don’t tell me,” he said instead. “You have a list of failings as long as my arm.”

“No, Captain, I don’t, no matter how much you wish to believe the contrary.” She closed her eyes briefly and sighed. “Good night, then, and forgive me for disturbing you.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that, yes.” She gave her shoulders an odd little shrug, almost a shudder. “I’ve caused us both enough trouble tonight, haven’t I?”

He caught her arm as she turned toward the door. Beneath the silk, her skin was warm and he felt the quickening of her heartbeat at his touch. “You can’t go now.”

She looked pointedly at his hand before she raised her gaze to meet his. “Why not? You’ve been telling me to leave ever since you woke.”

“Use your ears, ma’am, and you’ll know. All’s quiet below. It must be well past midnight.”

“Then I can let myself out. I’m hardly helpless, you know. My coachman will be waiting with the carriage where I left him, at the bottom of the hill.”

“Well, you’re not going alone.” He released her arm, reaching for his shirt and tugging it over his head. Helpless or not, she wasn’t going to traipse off into the darkness by herself as long as he had anything to say about it.

“I assure you such sudden chivalry isn’t necessary,” she said indignantly. “I’m quite capable.”

“Oh, aye, I’m sure you are.” He shrugged on his coat, not bothering with a waistcoat or hat, and smoothed back his hair. “And don’t mistake it for chivalry. If you’re found in the shrubbery tomorrow with your throat slit and your diamonds gone, I don’t want to be the last one who saw you alive.”

She made a disgruntled, undignified sound in the back of her throat that made him smile. He liked her better this way, when she wasn’t so busy being a great lady. Given the chance, perhaps in the moonlight beside her coach, he’d kiss her again.

No, he wasn’t being chivalrous at all.

He took the lantern from the table beside the bed. “Along with you then, ma’am.”

“If you can’t bring yourself to call me ‘Caro,’ then you must use Lady Byfield,” she said irritably as she followed him. “‘Ma’am’ is common.”

“Common or not, it’s what we call ladies in my country,” he said drily. “I fought a war with your people over such things.”

She didn’t answer, or maybe she was ignoring him, but he didn’t care so long as she was quiet and didn’t wake the rest of the house. He’d no wish to explain any of this to his sister, or worse, to his brother-in-law. Oh, he meant to have a few words with Jack in the morning, all right, but not with the subject of their discussion present the way she was now.

The long hallway to the front stairs was dark, and the single candle lit their way only a few shadowy feet before them. Fiercely Jeremiah lifted the lantern higher, determined to control the wariness that could turn so easily into fear. He’d walked this hall a hundred times, no, a thousand, in daylight without coming to harm. What difference, then, could there be in the dark?

He felt the woman beside him tentatively take his arm, and he patted her hand self-consciously to reassure her. If it had been a long time since he’d lain with a woman, it had been longer still since one had turned to him for comfort. He smiled wryly to himself, wondering what she’d do if she’d learned the truth about the sorry champion she’d chosen.

But once outside, she scurried away from him, skipping down the stone steps with her white gown fluttering out behind her in the moonlight. He followed more slowly, for the wound still pained him if he moved too fast, and he’d no wish to begin wincing and gasping like an old man before her.

The moon was almost full, the sweeping lawns around the house lit nearly as bright as by day, and Jeremiah relaxed. No demons here; here his only company was this sprite of a countess. The gravel of the drive crunched beneath their feet and with an exasperated mutter she stepped onto the grass instead.

“You’ll ruin your slippers,” warned Jeremiah as he joined her. “The dew’s already fallen.”

“I don’t care. It won’t be the first time, and I doubt it will be the last.” She paused, waiting for him to catch up. “I refuse to stay off the grass simply because ladies’ slippers are so insubstantial. It vexes Frederick, of course, but I lived in the country as a child, and if I could I’d go without shoes and stockings and garters altogether.”

“Then shuck them off now. Where’s the harm?” The night was warm for April, and Jeremiah liked the idea of her vexing this infernal Frederick.

She grinned at him. “I could, couldn’t I?”

“Of course you can,” he said easily. “I won’t tell.”

“Then I shall do it.” Modestly she turned away from him as she lifted her skirt, but as she bent to untie her garters, the white silk gown draped over her round, upturned bottom in a charming, if unintentional, invitation that Jeremiah found far more provocative than any mere show of her ankles ever could be. When he’d been younger, women had bundled themselves away in layers of petticoats and buckram, but the scanty fashions now were worse—or better—than if they’d come out walking naked. And this woman before him would tempt a saint to sin.

Purposefully he looked up at the stars overhead and away from her. “I was raised in the country, too, and we didn’t wear shoes from May till September, excepting when Granmam made us dress for church on Sundays.”

“On a farm?” she asked eagerly. She was upright again, safe for him to look at as they once again began walking down the hill toward the gates and the road. In the swinging circle of the lantern’s light her bare toes peeked out from beneath the hem of her gown. She held her slippers in one hand and her stockings in the other, the fine-gauge silk of the stockings still keeping the shape of her calves as they drifted out from her hand. “I’ve always liked farms.”

“It was a plantation, really, though all that means is a bigger farm that the owner doesn’t work himself.”

“A plantation? That sounds very grand.”

“For Rhode Island, it was,” he agreed, remembering the last real home he’d had before he’d gone to sea. “My grandfather made a king’s ransom from privateering, and he must have spent half of it on that house alone. But I expect it would pale beside what a countess would call home, even in the country.”

“Indeed,” she said softly. “A proper countess most likely would.”

“You’d know better than I.” There was no mistaking the wistfulness in her voice, and he didn’t understand it. He brushed the back of his fingers lightly across her arm, just enough to make her look back at him. “Exactly why did you wish to see me, Caro? You must have come with some reason in mind.”

She frowned as she realized he’d finally used her given name, and rubbed the place on her arm that he’d touched.

“It doesn’t matter now,” she said swiftly, her words tumbling over one another. “I thought that we might help each other, but now I see how foolish an idea that was. I hadn’t expected—oh, but I’ll never see you again, so none of it matters anyway, does it? Look, there’s my coach, just beyond the gate. There’s no reason for you to come any farther.”

“Don’t, lass.” He reached for her, but she scurried across the grass beyond his reach. “Damnation, I said I’d see you to your carriage!”

“And I say it’s not necessary. Good night, Captain Sparhawk, and goodbye.”

She turned and ran, holding her skirts up above her bare feet. He called her name, but she didn’t look back, and he let her go. She was right: most likely they would never see each other again. She was an English countess and he was an American shipmaster, and in another week, a fortnight at the most, he meant to be gone, back to Rhode Island to pick up the shattered pieces of his life as best he could.

He watched her disappear through the door beside the gate, and he smiled to himself as he thought of her bare pink toes. He hoped she didn’t catch hell from Frederick when she got home. The man should take better care of his wife.

But still Jeremiah wished she’d stayed a little longer.