Then he reached the maid in a soundless stride, grasped her hips, pressed his own arousing tumescence against her, and as she gasped, jerking upright, he nipped the nape of her neck.
“You scared me,” she scolded breathlessly without turning, relaxing visibly.
“Did I?” He was pulling her firmly against his body, wrapping his arms around her, throbbing against her buttocks. He rubbed himself lazily, then urgently, there.
“Y-yes.” She gasped. Despite her passion, it flitted through her mind to tell him that he frightened her more often than not. That it was only when they were making love that shewasn’tafraid of him. She knew she would never say so.
The earl pressed his face into the side of her neck and ran his palm over her groin, again and again, until she was thrusting against him and he was thrusting against her.
Sullenly he pushed her onto her belly on his desk, flipping up her skirts. He entered her abruptly and she cried out—yet it was clearly in pleasure, not pain. She was wet and hot and he groaned in undisguised pleasure.
“Harder, my lord.” She gasped. “Harder!”
The earl held her hips and thrust. A moment later it was over. He did not even try to contain his own release—he did not care to. He rested a scant minute, his weight upon her, letting her finish, then he withdrew and fastened up his breeches. He moved to the sideboard and poured himself a whiskey. He was aware of the maid, Molly, fixing her skirts behind him. His mind was elsewhere. It had been foolish to ride No Regrets like that just now, with the race just around the corner. Very foolish. He sipped the drink and resolved not to do so again. His gaze drifted to the open French doors and the lawns beyond. Molly, daring a quick glance at him, left without a word. He barely noticed her.
His foul humor returned. His gaze found the crushed letter, now lying upon his desk where the girl had left it. She had tried to smooth it out. A ward. Christ! Just what in hell was he going to do with a seventeen-year-old ward?
He cursed again, viciously.
The Earl of Dragmore was furious.
2
I will not be afraid.
I am not afraid.
It was a refrain that Jane kept repeating, with a kind of desperate determination, the closer they got to Dragmore. She sat stiffly glued to the seat of the hansom they had rented at the rail depot in Lessing. Her hands, gloved in fragile white lace, twisted miserably in her lap. Her blue eyes barely focused on the rolling meadows, the treetops framing them vividly against the dismal August sky. A fine English mist covered the countryside. She did not see the beauty of the Sussex landscape. She could only feel the tight, tense beating of her heart.
Oh, whatever had possessed her to do something so stupid as dress up in dead Charlotte Mackinney’s clothes and haunt the school bully, Timothy Smith? The whole plan, inspired by her vivid imagination and her desire to scare the pants off the boy, who deserved at least one good setdown for all his cruel, bullying ways, had backfired, and soundly. Charlotte Mackinney was Tim’s aunt and dead one month. Janehadscared the daylights out of Timmy, floating into his room at night like that, lingering, beckoning, just like a ghost—after all, she was an actress. She relished the part. She played it to the hilt. Timmy had been whiter than her own fair complexion, as white as the whites of his eyes. He’d been frozen stiff. Jane had so gotten into the role, drifting around the doorway of his bedroom, that she hadn’t heard anyone coming down the corridor. She had nearly jumped out of her skin and Charlotte Mackinney’s dress when a woman behind her exclaimed, “What’s this!”
It was pitch black in Timmy’s bedroom, except for the glow of the full moon, and near pitch in the hall. Jane found herself face to face with Timmy’s mother—Charlotte’s sister. Abigail Smith saw Charlotte’s dress and flaming hair and fell dead in a faint at her feet. Jane managed to stifle a scream. She picked up her hem and ran. In her haste she went smack into the door jamb, stubbing her toe smartly. She cried out in pain. That was the beginning of the end.
“You ain’t no ghost!” Timothy shouted.
Jane threw him a look. Timothy was beet red, whether from embarrassment or fury Jane didn’t know. But he was a mean fifteen-year-old bully, six feet tall and twice her weight, and Jane suspected she was in dire straits. She ran.
Timothy caught her.
Now Jane blinked back a sudden tear. Everything had gone so well until Abigail Smith had come along and fainted. Damn damn damn her impulsive, reckless behavior! If only Abigail had picked another time to go to bed, if only she, Jane, had enjoyed her performance less and quit sooner, while she was ahead, if only she hadn’t thought of the stupid idea anyway … If, if if!
They called him the Lord of Darkness.
Jane shuddered. She told herself not to be silly, to stop thinking like a moron. He was no devil. He was just a man. She was not afraid.
She shot her aunt a despairing glance. She knew there would be no sympathy from that stiff-backed widow. Matilda sat ramrod straight, eyes turned out of the carriage to the countryside. Jane had to try.
“Aunt Matilda, are you sure you won’t reconsider?” Her voice broke. She couldn’t control it.
Matilda turned her plump, unsmiling face to her niece. “We are almost there. Don’t you dare pull any of your ill-mannered, thoughtless stunts, Jane. I’m warning you. You had it easy when Fred was alive, that you did—twisted him around your finger, you did, with those big blue eyes. An’ these past six months you’ve run free, you did, with me grievin’ an’ all, God bless his departed soul. But the earl ain’t a foolish country parson. He won’t put up with any pranks from you.” Matilda shook her finger. “No stunts, you hear!”
Jane turned her pale, gamin face away, biting her full lower lip. Matilda had never liked her, never cared. Her uncle, Fred, who had died last winter of a heart attack—he had liked her, a little, anyway. Maybe it was for the best. She would go crazy living with the stern, no-nonsense Matilda. She had never seen the woman smile, not once.
She had considered running away. After all, she was seventeen, soon to be eighteen. But Matilda’s decision to pack her off to Dragmore had come so suddenly, she hadn’t the chance to formulate any plans. Yet she could still do it. A surge of warmth filled her heart, and Jane thought about her friends—her real family—left behind four years ago in London. The King’s Acting Company of the Royal Lyceum Theatre.
If only Robert had never made her leave.
Her mother had been Sandra Barclay, the famous actress. Jane had grown up in theaters across the country. As an infant a nurse had rocked her in her mother’s dressing room. Jane had fallen to sleep soothed by the sounds of the standing ovations her mother received on stage. As a toddler she had seen her beautiful blond mother sweeping into the chamber clad in elaborate costumes, glittering and sequined, then sweeping out again, in a different dress, to the roar of applause and whistles and shouts. As a young child she had watched, wide-eyed, her mother on the stage, gesturing, crying, laughing, even dying—only to stand up again and receive one thunderous ovation after the other. Roses were strewn at her feet. Again and again.
