The Greatest Lover in All England Page 9

  “I told you, I don’t love—” She took a calming breath. “If we must perform this wicked blackmail, then why not do it at once and get it over with? Once we’ve been tossed off the estate by Tony’s guards, we’ll be able to patch ourselves up and return to a normal life.”

  Why not do it at once? A movement caught Sir Danny’s eye, and he watched, immobile, as three women, two dark and one blond, strolled across the lawn and entered the garden.

  “Danny?” Rosie sounded a little breathless, a little confused.

  He reassured her. “We’ll do it soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “Soon.” He hopped off the rail and took her hand. “As soon as you can do more than recite Ophelia’s part.”

  She jerked her hand away. “I don’t want to practice anymore now.”

  Wheeling, fuming, Rosie ran down the steps, and, from the garden, Tony watched. Tony watched, and she seemed to be totally unaware.

  Tony didn’t like that. He wanted her to be aware of him all the time.

  It seemed only fair, after all. His servants had instructions to report her every move, yet without being told, he knew her approximate location at all times. He had only to lay eyes on her, and he knew her mood, her thoughts, and he liked it all. Admired her character, respected her mind, lusted after her body, and liked her.

  Except for his sisters, he didn’t know another woman he liked.

  Dangerous, to couple admiration, respect, and lust.

  “Tony.”

  He glanced back at the ladies seated in the garden. His two sisters and Lady Honora stared at him as if he were an interesting specimen of beast imported from the New World, and he stared back. “Aye?”

  “You’ve been skulking through your own manor and across your own estate like an uninvited guest,” Lady Honora said.

  “Do you fear the rumors of the heir’s return?” Ann inquired.

  Jean’s swarthy brow darkened yet further. “For you’ve chosen a sure method of convincing all of your detractors of your dubiety.”

  Separately, each one of them was a formidable woman. Together, they formed a fair representation of the Greek Furies, and he didn’t want to hear their prophecies of doom. He began edging away, anxious to pursue Rosie.

  “Why haven’t you returned to London and the queen?” Lady Honora demanded.

  “Because the queen forbade him to appear in her presence until she called for him.” Jean answered for him.

  “When has Tony ever heeded the rules?” Ann asked. Then, “Where is he going?”

  Faintly, he heard Jean say, “He must be trailing after that actor again. The acting troupe has been the catalyst for his odd behavior. They will have to go, don’t you agree, Lady Honora?”

  He strained his ears, but heard no reply.

  “Lady Honora?” Ann sounded puzzled.

  Curiosity urged Tony to linger, to discover what falsehoods Sir Danny had been spewing in those “chance” meetings with Lady Honora. Sir Danny, too, had been under observation.

  But Rosie walked quickly. She seemed to know where she was going, although this was the first time she’d been far from the manor. He followed her up a rise, down a hill, and along a faint path. It wound over grass well cropped by sheep, across the stepping-stones of a brook, and into a wood bare of leaves. She lost the path; she found it without a qualm.

  And he now knew her destination.

  A waterfall. A pool. A place where magic happened.

  The waterfall shivered in the chilly breeze, and broke the sunlight into individual rainbows. Rosie skipped forward as if she could catch the rainbows by extending her hand. She smiled as she dabbed her fingers in the pool, spoke to some unknown entity, and then listened.

  Did she receive a reply?

  None that Tony heard, but Rosie drooped. Then, subdued, she nestled against a sunlit boulder, absorbing the warmth.

  He didn’t like the tenderness she evoked in him. If she was to play the role of heir—and he almost hoped she would, so he could loose his revenge on her—he shouldn’t be observing her vulnerabilities, and he positively shouldn’t be touched by them. A lesser man might find himself in the throes of some inappropriate passion. But not him.

  He stepped out of his shoes and placed them beneath an oak. Careful to be silent, he stripped off his doublet. Nay, not him. He was a bastard, and a ruthless one, but he never forgot his principles. He wouldn’t use her as he wished and father another bastard who sold his soul for respectability.

  Puffing above his head, the wind provided a humming accompaniment to the splatter of water on the flat rocks.

  He would entice her instead. When her mind whirled with confusion and she’d revealed the plot which threatened his property, he would free her from the masquerade which shackled her.

  He would be doing her a favor. He untied the string at the neck of his shirt. Her situation confused her. Sometimes a woman, too often a child, she provided Tony with endless entertainment as she struggled to reconcile her feminine instincts with the role of young man, which had been assigned her. But he wanted to banish the youth and encourage the child to grow up. He wanted her to notice him. He wanted her to think of him as a man. He wanted her never to look at him without seeing a lover—because of the plot, of course.

  His hands on the hem of his shirt, he hesitated. Could he resist her if she saw him as a lover? If she wore a woman’s clothes, smiled at him with a woman’s smile, flirted like a woman in love…

  He ripped his shirt off and tossed it aside. The wind nipped with a touch of autumn’s chill, but it cooled him.

  He was too hot.

  Moving forward, he touched her shoulder. “I’m going in,” he told her. “Want to join me?”

  She jumped up with a shriek. “Sir Anthony!” She caught her breath. “I didn’t hear you approach.”

  “I wasn’t quiet.” He rotated his shoulders to ease the tension of the past few days and to show off like a peacock strutting for his peahen.

  “I must have been in another world.”

  As he suspected.

  But she wasn’t in another world now. With both feet planted—literally and figuratively—in the dirt of Odyssey estate, she stared, wide-eyed, at the broad expanse of chest he displayed. She watched each inhalation with fascination. Her gaze traced each muscle, and he found himself sucking in an already-tight abdomen.

  Without ever looking up at his face, she said, “I suppose I should go back to the manor.”

  “Why?” He pressed her back down beside the rock, and she sank as if her knees had pudding where the cartilage should be. He allowed himself a triumphant grin as his hands went to the ties of his garters.

  In his lifetime, he’d used his charm to get his way and his strength to win his battles. It was gratifying to know he could use his body to enravish a woman—or at least this woman.

  “Gracious, look at the sun!”

  How she could see the sun when her gaze remained bound to his every movement, he didn’t know.

  “I promised Sir Danny I would would rehearse my part, and I’m late already. If you’ll excuse me…” She half rose.

  By God, she wasn’t leaving until she’d seen the best part, and so he asked, “I find myself unable to decide—where do women fit in your scheme of life?”

  She collapsed back down. “Women?”

  “It has occurred to me that you’re a young man with no outlet for your natural drives. You haven’t vigorously pursued the maids, for which I am grateful. Yet perhaps you would be pleased to have a more intimate acquaintance with the fair sex, without the disturbance of involvement?”

  “The disturbance of involvement!” Rosie blurted. “What did you have in mind?”

  “A visit to the brothel in London. I have not been there for too many months myself and I have a very experienced lady waiting for me. I feel sure she can find an equally experienced and lovely lady for you. It was in this house that I gained my first knowledge of a woman’s secrets, and it was go
od.” He had vanquished not only the shadows from her eyes, but also the ability to flee. Consternation and anticipation held her as surely as if he’d tied her. “What is wrong, little man? You look as if you have never had a woman before.” He had trouble restraining a shout of laughter at the stark panic on Rosie’s face, and in simulated amazement said, “You have never had a woman before!”

  Nodding, she agreed vigorously. “You are right! I have never had a woman before!”

  “Didn’t Sir Danny take you to a whorehouse?”

  “I honestly do not believe the thought ever crossed his mind,” choked Rosie.

  “Then I’ll take you.” He almost felt sorry for her as he peeled off his stockings, but not sorry enough to stop. He had her attention now, her full attention, and he meant to keep it. “I assure you, Tiny Mary runs the finest brothel in London—nay, in all of England.”

  “Tiny Mary?” With an astonished half grin, Rosie admitted, “I’ve been to Tiny Mary’s.”

  “Have you?” Damn, when had that happened? “That must have been most interesting.”

  Her smile disappeared. “Oh, it was.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “It made my blood race.”

  He didn’t want to know. “Well, when I was thirteen, my father paid for the whole night with a hot-blooded Spanish woman.” That much was the truth. “She laid the groundwork I have built on ever since. What pleasured me, what pleasured her, how to build a woman’s impatience, how to restrain my own. I have used every means she taught me and I think I can say, without bragging, that my lovers have been well serviced.”

  He reminisced for a purpose. He reminisced to construct a picture in her mind, and from her restless reaction, he knew he’d achieved his purpose.

  “It was an unforgettable lesson. So it is settled!” He slapped his knee with resolution. “We will visit Tiny Mary’s. At once! On the morrow!” He waggled his brows suggestively and wondered how the inventive woman would get out of this.

  She didn’t disappoint him. “I have no money.”

  “I will pay,” he retorted. “I insist. It is an honor to pay for an initiation for our beloved actor.”

  Ah, but even this bit of reprisal tasted sweet, and he hopped from one foot to the other as he stripped off his canions, leaving only his brief—very brief—braes. “Are you sure you won’t join me in a swim?”

  She could barely shake her head and touched the sling of sticks and white linen. “My arm,” she whispered, then dropped her gaze to her hands. Digging her fingers into the dirt, she created a road that wound through the drifts of early-fallen leaves.

  The scent of rich humus rose in waves from the earth as it basked in the sun’s last foray, and it made him think of the pleasure in planting a seed and seeing it grow. He’d never had that pleasure; coitus interruptus had been effective for him. Would it be effective if Rosie were the woman who moaned beneath him?

  The image almost brought him to his knees before her. It would be so easy here in this secluded place to steal her clothes and her defenses and make her his. It would be revenge and pleasure all in one.

  But coitus interruptus, he knew, did not always work. Too many babes had been created by couples who never even got to enjoy the ultimate pleasure. Yet if he and Rosie made a babe—a thrill shivered through him—he would have to wed her.

  He looked again at her bent head. He noted the motley clothes, the grime around her collar and at her wrists. He remembered how she mixed the high-class English she’d learned as an actress with the lower-class accent of the London streets, and how she occasionally dropped into some obscure dialect from the provinces.

  Wed Rosie. A nobody. Worse than nobody, an actress. A woman who dressed as a man. He’d be the laughingstock of London, and a furious Elizabeth would reclaim his lands with the justifiable comment that he was crazed.

  His lands. Everything he’d worked for.

  No, he couldn’t make a babe with her, and he certainly couldn’t wed her.

  Besides—he chuckled at his self-deception—if he ever got inside of Rosie, he would never leave.

  Her head jerked up at his laughter, and he examined the wide eyes and softly opened mouth. No, with Rosie there’d be no control.

  As coyly as a barmaid enticing a customer, he stroked off his braes. “Ahh.” He stretched, every last bare inch of him displayed in the broad sunshine. She blushed beautifully. “How did you find this place?”

  Curiosity as well as compulsion raised the question. A jewel hidden on the estate, the waterfall cascaded into a pool deep enough to swim in and clear enough to pick pennies off the sandy bottom. It had taken good instructions and the better part of a day for him to find it the first time, yet she had walked right to it. How did she do it? What instinct carried her through Odyssey Manor and its environs with such foreknowledge? And why did her insight constantly seem to surprise her?

  “Rosie?”

  “I just”—her gaze examined him above and below—“knew it was here.”

  Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. She sat; he stood. She gawked; he preened. She wondered; he wanted.

  “As you just knew”—he coughed, clearing the lust from his throat—“that my antechamber used to be the master’s chamber?”

  “The master bedroom. ’Twas a natural mistake to think the master”—her gaze flashed to his in what might have been feminine challenge—“would be big.”

  Dumbstruck, he realized that this was the woman she would be if she were allowed: pert, bawdy, flirtatious, and more desirable than a temptress in the shadows.

  “Damn.” With an alacrity he hadn’t planned, he walked a straight line into the cold brook. He’d planned to show himself to her, display his wares for the unwilling shopper, but his wares had grown to such a great size, he deemed it likely he would faint from lack of blood to his brain.

  Such a shame he needed his brain. “Have you any soap about you?” he asked, as he splashed into the water up to his waist, and waited for its icy embrace to take effect.

  She mumbled something, then pulled it from the purse at her waist. “Here.” She tossed it toward the creek and he scrambled to catch it. “Give it back when you’re done.”

  “You throw like a woman,” he grumbled, lifted the misshapen bar to his nose. It smelled of carnations, and he sank beneath the surface under the effect of its seduction. Such a lady’s scent would betray her at once if she used it, but the fact that she carried it revealed much.

  So much, in fact, that he swam inside the frigid water until he could break the surface and sing soprano. “I love a bath,” he called, scrupulously regulating the deep tones. “You ought to come in, too. It would rid you of that musty smell.” He scrubbed his hair with the bar of soap and sneaked a glance.

  She cautiously sniffed her clothing. “It’s a manly smell,” she said stoutly.

  “Nonsense,” he answered. “I don’t smell. Am I not a man?”

  In total control of himself, he stepped up to the edge of the pool, water at his knees, and spread his arms wide. Her gaze fixed, pasted to him like some housewife’s concoction.

  “You…don’t stuff your canions with a sack of beans,” she said.

  He leaned his head into the water to rinse the soap from his hair, to hide his grin, and incidentally to give her an uninterrupted view of his backside. When he had his amusement adequately contained, he stood and called, “Give me your cloak as a towel.”

  No one answered him.

  She was gone, and on the hill where she had been sitting, only a circlet of crushed grass remained. Only the crushed grass, and the memory of her amber eyes, alive with shock, unwanted curiosity, and the beginnings of a woman’s awareness.

  9

  The strawberry grows underneath the nettle.

  —HENRY V. I. i. 60

  Sir Danny stood on the step leading into the wagon that was their home and peered inside the dim, crowded interior. “Rosie?”

  “I’m in here.”

&
nbsp; “Remain, Ludovic,” Sir Danny instructed, then edged inside. Two short, narrow beds piled with blankets took up most of the room, with a narrow walkway between. Hooks in the walls held props and costumes, and pieces of scaffolding crowded the one available foot of floor space. Rosie sat on her bed, absorbed in some task, and he asked, “Where have you been?”

  “There aren’t enough beans in my bag.” She picked up another handful of broad beans, awkwardly stuffed them in, then with her uninjured hand exhibited the sack to Sir Danny. “Is that more realistic, do you think?”

  Sir Danny looked as puzzled as she’d ever seen him. “What are you talking about?”

  Realizing Ludovic stood on the ground just outside, she hesitated. Should she proceed? Should she provoke Sir Danny while his infinitely more dangerous lieutenant listened? But aye, she should, for always before, she knew she could depend on Sir Danny’s unerring fatherly instinct. Yet he had been different lately, and she thought that if she baited Sir Danny in vain, Ludovic would provide the added incentive to move, to leave, to proceed with their plan or proceed with their travels. She wanted action, she wanted it now, and she would cold-bloodedly incite Sir Danny to perform or pack up.

  Of course, they couldn’t return to London. The earl of Essex wouldn’t have forgotten them so soon. But they could travel the provinces. With an innocence that should have fooled no one, she said, “You should have told me my man-root was undersized. I’d have taken care of it before.”

  Sweat suddenly sheened Sir Danny’s brow. “It never occurred to me to discuss…” He glanced over his shoulder at Ludovic, crowding in close. “Why do you think your, uh, man-root is undersized?”

  “Tony’s is a lot bigger than this.” She jiggled the sack. “But I can’t fit any more in.”

  Sir Danny took a sudden step forward. “Tony’s what?”

  “His man-root.”

  “I heard you!” Sir Danny snapped.