by Mary Balogh
Diana stood where she was for a long time after he had gone, the bedclothes still clutched to her with one hand, the window curtains still held back from the window with the other. Her teeth clacked open themselves, and her knees trembled beneath her. But she would have collapsed completely if she had moved so much as a finger, she was convinced.
The effects of the laudanum were rolling back like waves of the sea. She was standing there in the flesh—very much in the flesh—on the hard wooden floor of a country inn. A man had just left her room. A man who had shared her bed and who had all but shared her body.
A very real man.
A man she had dreaded to meet downstairs the afternoon before because he had seen her legs bared to the knee.
Gracious heaven above!
She heard a faint commotion outside her room and stayed where she was.
She watched Bridget bustle into her room a few minutes later, wearing only a crumpled shift as far as she could see in the near-darkness, and carrying some other clothes under one arm.
And Diana stayed where she was.
'' Mum!'' Bridget said, dropping her bundle on the truckle bed and coming toward the window.
"B-b-bridget?" She clamped her teeth hard enough together almost to crack them all.
"Mum," Bridget said, taking the curtains from Diana's nerveless fingers and letting them drop back over the window. She opened her ample arms and Diana—blankets and all—came into mem.
4
"What was all the commotion last night?" Lester asked the marquess at breakfast the following morning.
"Commotion?" Lord Kenwood yawned behind one hand and wondered if the sausage before him on his plate was just too greasy to be attempted.
"I distinctly heard the barmaid's voice," Lester said. "And Carter's. There was someone else there too. That plump lady's maid, at a guess."
"Hm," the marquess said, deciding that the sausage should not be attempted. Not at least on an empty stomach.
"I thought perhaps you had thrown the barmaid out of your room," Lord Crensford said. "She was in your room, I assume? I did think of going out and inviting her into mine if you had no use for her. But of course, I was sharing the room with Lester."
"It was all just a little misunderstanding, I gather," Lord Kenwood said, waving his hand dismissively and looking with some distaste into his cup. That muddy substance was coffee? He would drink ale, thank you very much.
Lord Crensford looked suddenly disapproving. "You never had both of them in your room, Jack?" he said suspiciously. "The maid and the barmaid, I mean. Oh, I say, that was rather greedy: And Carter handed in his notice, did he? Can't say I blame him."
''You are very far wide of the mark,'' the marquess said. ''Carter is at this moment packing my things in the hope that we can vacate this infernal inn some time today. Shall we have this mess cleared away? It is making my stomach feel decidedly queasy."
"I'll have your sausage if you don't want it, Jack," Lester said. "You had better be careful, you know, not to wear yourself out before giving chase to the widow. It would be somewhat lowering, would it not, to have the wager all but won only to discover that you were incapable?"
The marquess raised one eloquent eyebrow. Lord Crensford scowled into his undrinkable coffee.
"Hey, Jack," he said, "this is the limit, you know. Past a joke and all that. I'm deadly serious. I can't allow this wager. Teddy's Diana and all that. This has to stop right here and now."
"It's too late to think of that now, my lad," Lord Kenwood said. "The wager is made and honor is at the stake. And we have been over this ground ad nauseam. But you needn't fret, Ernie. I can safely promise yet again—and for positively the last time—that I will not be doing anything to your precious Diana that she will not thoroughly enjoy."
"That is what I like about Jack," Lester said to his extra sausage. "His incurable modesty."
"Let's play a hand of cards," the marquess said, "and pray that the sun gets up soon and dries that mudbath out there. This has to be the worst road in all England. And I would wager that the landlord of this inn slips someone a sizeable bribe to keep it that way. How else would he induce any travelers to stay here? There are not even any locks on the infernal doors."
Lester laughed. "Is that what happened, Jack?" he asked. "Did the second female let herself into your room only to find that you were not yet finished with the first?"
"Deal the cards!" the marquess commanded.
He won three hands in a row quite handily although his concentration was only half on the game. His eyes kept roaming to the staircase, but of course she did not come down. And would not, doubtless, until he had left the inn. He supposed it would be somewhat embarrassing for a female to come face-to-face in the harsh light of morning with the stranger who had shared her bed for half of the night before and who had stripped her and caressed her and aroused her and taken her to the very brink of penetration.
And she was no ordinary female. She was a lady. Both her appearance and demeanor of the day before had shown him that. She had doubtless been suffering from the vapors ever since. Though perhaps not. She might be a lady in rank and appearance, but she was all woman in bed. He wondered about the absent husband or lover she had taken him for.
And envied the man.
The night had progressed like an absurd bedroom farce. When he had closed the door of her room behind him, clad only in his breeches, the rest of his clothes bundled under his arm, it was to find Carter and the lady's maid in heated conversation in the doorway to his room.
Carter's eyes had taken in the bareness of his upper body and feet and thrown him a look of disdain such as only valets of a very superior class were capable of.
The girl's eyes had taken in the same details, and her flush without a doubt had extended down to her toenails.
"My lady!" she cried, throwing her hands in the air, apparently unaware of her unfetching appearance in a shapeless and wrinkled shift. "My poor lamb."
"Hush," Lord Kenwood had commanded. "Your poor lamb is quite safe, my girl, and would have been saved from embarrassment too if you had only remembered at bedtime which was your own room."
"This person," Carter had said—Carter had a gift for making a person sound like a worm beneath the toe of his boot—"this person offered to break my head with the water jug, m'lord. And I do not know what she was doing in your room if she was not robbing your valuables, since your person was not in there."
Bridget had appeared to swell like a hot air balloon. "I do take mortal offense at that insinuation," she had said. "I have never stolen so much as a tin spoon, my man, I would have you know."
"Hush!" The marquess's tone had silenced both combatants. "I have no doubt your mistress needs you, my girl—Bridget, is it? Pick up your dress and go to her immediately, if you please."
It was to the girl's credit that she had not quite passed out when she looked down at herself and realized her dreadful state of deshabille. If she had blushed scarlet at sight of him, she had turned more puce at sight of herself. She had obeyed him immediately, throwing her hands in the air again and calling on a superior power to love them all,
Carter, it seemed, had been woken earlier from his uncomfortable perch beside the dead kitchen fire by the arrival of the barmaid, all injured indignation. She had had a thing or two to say about gentlemen who promised one a night's occupation and for whom one had kept oneself up later than usual, though that was late enough, the good Lord knew, washing one's hands and face and combing one's hair and dabbing on some scent from one's only precious bottle, only to find when one went to his room that there was another doxy there.
"Doxy," the marquess had commented. "Bridget? Oh, unfair, Carter, unfair. Poor Bridget."
And men to find, the barmaid had continued, that the maid had already been abandoned in favor of the mistress, with whom the grand gentleman had chosen to sport for the rest of the night—in her room, if you please. Who did the strumpet think she was? A royal princess?
Carter had not quite followed the girl's logic, but he had concluded after she had retired and he had endured another hour of discomfort that his master's room must be empty and that it would be stupid of him not to make use of the truckle bed he had set up earlier the evening before.
"But when I got here, m'lord," he had said, his voice accusing and aggrieved, "it was to find that person occupying my bed and offering to throw things at my head. Unsavory goings-on, if I may make so bold as to say so."
"Feel free," Lord Kenwood had said, kicking off his breeches again with a sigh of relief and climbing
into his own bed at last. "But very quietly and into your pillow, if you will, Carter."
But he had not slept. Damn his mouth. Why had he not just come when she had begged him to come and where she had begged him to come, and explored the interesting question of her identity when passion had been sated? So soft. So yielding. So pantingly hot and aroused.
Damnation!
Carter had raised his head in silent and long-suffering protest when the marquess thumped his pillow vengefully.
A strange, strange night, he thought now, the third game of cards won. Almost a blissful night. A few more seconds and it would have been too late for either of them to wonder about—or worry about—the identity of the other. And he would never see her again. Strange to have shared that and never to have looked fully into each other's eyes. Deuce take it, but he did not even know the color of her eyes.
Lester hurled down his cards in disgust, stretched, and crossed the room restlessly to the outer door. "Another hour," he said, "and we can risk it. It's drying fast out there."
"Good," Lord Crensford said. "Another two hours would have me climbing the walls for amusement."
The marquess strolled across the room to the barmaid, who was busily and vengefully polishing a brass candlestick.
"I am afraid I missed you last night, my dear," he said, resting one hand lightly on her hip.
She tossed her head and pursed her lips. "It's all the same to me," she said. "I'm a good girl, like I said. My pa won't half like it that I have had to share a roof with a couple of high-classed doxies."
"I am sure you are a good girl," he said soothingly. "Allow me." He showed her a gold coin that had her eyes widening to such an extent that they were almost released from their sockets, and placed it edgewise between her breasts. She watched as he slid it down into her cleavage with two fingers.
"Ooh, sir," she said, "it is a pleasure to serve a gentleman like you."
"One kiss," he said, and set his lips lingeringly to hers.
Lester was grinning at him and Ernie looking wistful when he raised his head. And Bridget, carrying a large tray loaded with dishes, was blushing scarlet again as she turned to the stairs.
"I could come upstairs with you now, sir, I am sure, it being not busy in here today on account of the weather," the barmaid said.
The marquess flicked her chin with one careless finger. "You are a good girl, my dear," he said.
"I would not wish to corrupt innocence."
A little more than an hour later they were on their way at last, Lord Crensford and Lester in the curricule as on the day before, the Marquess of Kenwood astride his horse. The road was still soft and throwing up a considerable amount of dirt, but it was no longer slippery.
Lord Kenwood looked up to the window that he knew to be the lady's before he turned his horse's head out of the small stableyard. She was, as he had expected, standing there looking down, doubtless relieved to see that he was on his way. As he equally expected, she ducked back out of sight as soon as he raised his head.
But he touched his hat with his whip and grinned up at the window anyway. If he knew anything about women, she had removed herself only far enough so that she could look out without herself being seen.
He rode away from her with the deepest regret.
* * *
Diana had been standing at the window most of the morning, drumming her fingers on the windowsill.
It was clear to her sight as soon as she first woke up that the road was in no fit state for immediate travel. She willed the clouds to move off the face of the sun so that the drying might begin and travel be possible that day.
For as long as travel was impossible, for as long as that gentleman remained a guest at the inn, she must remain a prisoner in this room. A fine state of affairs for Mrs. Diana Ingram, who for the past year had prided herself on her maturity and independence.
But really she could not possibly risk coming face-to-face with him. She would the of mortification. Just die! She squirmed when she remembered. And how could she not remember with every single second that ticked past? A fantasy lover, indeed! How could he have been fantasy? He had done things to her that she had never even dreamed of. Things she would have burned with embarrassment over if her imagination had ever touched upon them. And she had enjoyed every moment with wanton abandon.
What utter humiliation!
There was only one small consolation. Very small. She would never see the man again. Indeed, she might not recognize him even if she did meet him again, or he her. She had actually seen him only when he had poked his head in at the carriage door, and he had been dripping and muddy at the time. He had seen her only when her bonnet was askew. Besides, he had been more interested in looking at her legs.
No, they would not know each other again even if they passed each other on the street.
She did not even know his name, or he hers.
But how could he not be a fantasy lover? How could any real man's body be so perfect? And how could a real man know so unerringly where and how to touch her? Perhaps he was ugly and squinted, she thought. Perhaps his ears stuck out. But no. Muddy as he had been the afternoon before, her main impression at the time had been that he was an extraordinarily handsome man.
Diana wished for a moment that Teddy had been a man to use oaths. She would have liked to borrow one for the occasion. Bother! she thought, but the word brought no relief to her feelings.
What a farce the night had been. How an audience would have screeched with appreciative mirth if they could have seen it acted out upon a stage. She had leapt out of bed, naked—she had never been naked in any man's presence before. She could have died. And when she had acted from instinct and snatched up the bedclothes—oh, gracious heaven! And why had she also pulled back the heavy curtains from the window?
She had been quite shocked by his nakedness. She had never seen Teddy even without his shirt. And this man had not only been naked; he had been . . . Oh, dear! She must not think of it.
She had collapsed in Bridget's arms for a full minute before pulling herself together and straightening up. "Bridget, whatever has happened to you?" she had asked, her mind registering the fact that her maid too was shaking.
"That nasty man!" Bridget had said after a few moments of incoherent blubbering. "Accused me of stealing, he did. Me, mum. Stealing! I don't know what he thought I was doing asleep in his bed if I was so intent on stealing all the valuables in the room. I would have broke his head with the water jug, I would, if I could have got my hands on it. Me a thief!"
"Who accused you of stealing?" Diana had asked, bewildered. "Whose bed?"
The whole story had come out at great length. Bridget, it seemed had been so flustered by the handsome gentleman's talking to her as they both climbed the stairs to bed that she had mistaken the room and gone into his.
"Did you ever hear tell of an inn with no locks on the doors, mum?" she had asked accusingly.
She had groped her way to the truckle bed so as not to disturb her sleeping mistress, and for the same reason had not rummaged looking around for her nightgown. She had just slipped off her dress instead. And then just after she had dropped asleep, the barmaid had fallen across her bed— "swearing something awful, mum. I would have liked to wash her mouth out with soap"—and been very abusive when she had discovered Bridget. Bridget, thinking the girl had come to rob, had given her a
length of her tongue—delivered in a whisper. But when she had realized that the girl was looking for the handsome gentleman, she had told her he was in the next room.
"And the hussy had the gall to set her hands on her hips, mum, and say you was a strumpet," Bridget had said indignantly. "I tripped over the bedclothes getting up from the bed, or I would have strumpeted her right enough."
And then when Bridget was fast asleep again, that man— he must be the gentleman's servant, Diana guessed—had tried to climb into the bed beside her and then had leaped out of it again and started calling her a thief and threatened to send for a justice of the peace.
"And then that handsome gentleman came out of this room, mum," Bridget had said, "with next to nothing on him, and I thought I would drop into a dead faint on the floor."