Кейси Майклс – Lords of Scandal: The Beleaguered Lord Bourne / The Enterprising Lord Edward (страница 4)

Jane wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Are you sure, Bundy? Perhaps my price tag is showing. Tell me, dearest Ernestine, is the marriage settlement to match my dowry, or will Papa throw in Mama’s diamonds to sweeten the pot?” A slight flush lending even more lively animation to her features, Jane goaded further. “Dearest, sweetest Bundy. First you served as nanny, then governess, then companion. I had not realized your real calling was that of procuress.”

Miss Bundy did not have an immediate spasm at her charge’s audacity. Indeed, she did not so much as blink her pale gray eyes. All Miss Bundy, that long-suffering servant, did was to pinch Jane’s cheeks to give them color, step back out of sight of the double doors to the drawing room, signal the snickering footman to step lively and announce his mistress to the company, and retire upstairs to the small brown bottle she kept concealed beneath her knitting. Life at Maitlands had long ago taught the woman the best way of dealing with either Sir Cedric or his audacious daughter was by prudent withdrawal. Jane would apologize, as she always did whenever her tongue ran away with her—not that the poor girl hadn’t cause enough for anger, being paraded about for the new earl like a prize calf—and in the end Miss Bundy would allow her sensibilities to be mollified by the way of Jane’s pretty pleas for forgiveness. It was a game they played, the two of them, with Jane tugging more and more at the leash of obedience every year as she grew from submissive girl to self-sufficient young woman.

Jane waited until Miss Bundy’s receding back disappeared around the curve in the stairs and then, her softly rounded chin held high, she took a deep breath, sent up a quick prayer that Lord Bourne wasn’t any more of a fool than he could help, and allowed herself to be announced.

The first person she saw when she entered the candle-lit chamber was Miss Latchwood. So, she thought wryly, Papa is leaving nothing to chance. If the poor earl so much as smiles in my direction that old biddy will have the entire countryside believing we have posted the banns. Nodding pleasantly to the older woman, who winked conspiratorially back at her, Jane turned her gaze in the direction of her father, just then posing at the mantelpiece under an obscure (for good reason) artist’s rendering of one of Sir Cedric’s epic exploits with the Mowbray men. “Good evening to you, Papa,” she intoned sweetly, dropping the man a curtsy. “Please forgive my tardiness, but the time just seemed to run away with me.”

Sir Cedric, seeing before him the reincarnation of his beloved deceased wife allowed himself to be charmed into forgiving Jane for keeping him from his dinner. Taking one of her small hands into one of his own huge paws, he turned her slightly so that he could introduce her to their guest of honor.

“Lord Bourne,” the proud father began, “allow me to introduce my daughter—”

“You!” loudly exclaimed the earl, fairly goggling at the girl as the very air between them suddenly began to crackle.

“So much for prayers,” Jane muttered disgustedly under her breath as she glared at the fashionably dressed young man with the gaping jaw.

Abigail Latchwood leaned forward in her chair, her powers of intuition telling her she had chanced to secure herself a front-row seat at what should prove to be a most interesting spectacle.

“I WOULD BE MORE THAN HAPPY to listen to your suggestions as to a solution to our problem, my lord, but I do not wish a dismal retelling of the problem itself. Do I make myself clear?”

“You do not wish! I do not wish, damn it, and since it is my feelings that concern me and I am forced to dismiss them I see no gentlemanly need to trifle over your paltry sensibilities.”

Jane paused to mull Kit’s words over a moment or two, and decided that she may have been looking at him in the wrong light entirely. Perhaps he was not the enemy. Perhaps she had been in the process of berating the only ally she had in the entire world—what with her father, Bundy, and even Goldie firmly listed among her adversaries in this matter.

“You are against this marriage plan of Papa’s?” Jane asked the man now standing across from her in the herb garden, his ebony hair gleaming in the bright morning sunlight. He nodded his head in the affirmative. “Then why,” she asked with a sudden return of heat, “didn’t you stop Papa when he first proposed the idea last night? You don’t strike me as a man who is usually at a loss for words.”

Kit shook his head in astonished disbelief. “Please don’t tell me you’re that much of a clothhead. After your ridiculous hysterical outburst last night when we were introduced there was deuced little I could do to rescue the situation.”

“My outburst?” Jane sniffed indelicately, correcting him. “I merely muttered a small involuntary verbalization prompted, my lord, by your inelegant bellow!”

Kit had the decency to admit to a slight lapse of his own, caused, undoubtedly, by his surprise at seeing his wild-haired Jennie parading about as the so-proper Miss Maitland. “But,” he rallied quickly, “it was not I who then fell apart like soggy tissue paper in the rain and confessed to every tiny detail of our meeting at Bourne Manor—right down to that truly sickening, simpering recital of what in fact had amounted to nothing more than a simple stolen kiss. Miss Latchwood nearly swooned dead away.”

“No she didn’t. She wouldn’t do anything so self-defeating—it might cause her to miss some juicy bit of gossip. Lord!” Jane shuddered at the memory. “I was hard-pressed not to offer her the loan of my handkerchief, she was drooling so copiously.”

“So you instead offered her the notion that poor, innocent Miss Jane Maitland might just have been compromised by that nasty Lord Bourne,” Kit sneered. “Lord!” he pressed, aping Jane’s exclamation. “You may as well have gone traipsing over the countryside ringing a bell, calling: ‘Kit Wilde kissed me in the Home Wood; Kit Wilde kissed me in—’”

“Don’t!” Jane begged, clapping her hands over her ears. “Papa never told me the names of our guests, you see, and I didn’t ask, as our dinner guests tend to be limited to Miss Latchwood, Squire Handley and his sister, or the vicar, and knowing beforehand just whom I shall be facing across the table does nothing to enliven my appetite. I only found out you were to be present a moment before I was announced. Under the circumstances I believe I did my best—”

Kit, plucked a stray thread off his sleeve as he interrupted wearily, “Your best? How very sad. Please, Miss Maitland, I beg you to refrain from bringing my attention to your shortcomings, as I am depressed enough as it is without—”

“When I am saying something, Lord Bourne,” Jane cut in with some heat, “you will oblige me by restraining your lamentable tendency to interrupt!”

With his head still lowered, Kit raised his eyebrows and peered at his adversary. “Welcome back, my little tiger cat. I was wondering how long it would take for Jennie to loose her claws on me.” Temper definitely became the chit, Kit mused to himself, admiring the flush on Jennie’s cheeks and the way the slight breeze set the blond curls around her face to dancing as her agitated movements caused her casual topknot to come half undone.

Jane looked back at him in disgust. She had requested this meeting with him this morning in the hope that together they would be able to find a way out of the muddle they had bumbled into the night before, but it was obvious now that she might just as well have saved herself the bother of eluding Bundy and engaging in what that very proper lady would only construe as yet another “tryst.”

“If you are quite done salving your wounded ego at my expense, I suggest we either put our heads together to find a way out of this ridiculous coil or else terminate our meeting so that you can return to Bourne Manor and barricade the doors against Papa’s wrath.”

If Sir Cedric’s wrath were all that was to be faced, Kit would have been more than capable of dealing with it in short order. But no. Once Jennie (he refused to call her Jane) had been escorted to her room by the soproperly outraged Miss Bundy and Miss Latchwood had been sequestered in the morning room with a half decanter of her favorite cherry brandy, Sir Cedric had confessed to Lord Bourne that he suffered from a “disky heart,” and any scandal surrounding his dear old child would as surely put him underground as would a bullet through the brain.

Kit was prompted to wonder aloud about how such a hearty-looking specimen—a man who rode to hounds with such vigor—could possibly be in ill health, a tactical error that sent Sir Cedric tottering posthaste to a nearby chair, a hand clutching at his ample bosom as he called weakly for his manservant. While Kit looked on, his face still showing his skepticism, Sir Cedric’s solicitous valet administered a draught to the panting gentleman and, with the help of two sturdy footmen, had his employer hoisted aloft in his chair and carted off to his bed—a move that put quite an effective period to any hope of rational discussion.