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Mariah waved Old Farley to a halt and gave him a grateful smile. The old fiddler nodded, rose, and shuffled off to his quarters in the stables…leaving her and Nimble Jack the only ones awake in the public room.
Her heart started to pound as he rose from his chair. He was taller than she’d realized, and his broad shoulders and long, muscular legs gave him an aura of physical strength that made her want to step back. She didn’t, but regretted it when he loomed over her and her knees weakened.
When he spoke, his deep tones generated a shocking vibration in her skin. She had to shake herself mentally to make sense of what he’d said.
“—cannot leave him here.” He took the unconscious prince by the arms, pulling him forward in the chair. “Show me the way to his room and help me get him into bed.”
She fought the urge to rub the gooseflesh his voice raised on her arms and shoulders. What was the matter with her? She hadn’t had that much of Carson’s brain-fuddling brew.
She stepped up onto a chair to grab a lantern from the rafter while Jack tried unsuccessfully to hoist the limp royal onto his shoulders. With a huff, she inserted herself under one of the prince’s arms, dragging it up and around her shoulders. Muttering irritably, Jack took the other arm and helped her haul the bulky future monarch to his feet.
“Come on, Bertie, give us some help here,” he growled.
But it was only when she spoke—“Come, Your Highness, time for bed. You do want to go to bed, don’t you?”—that some sense of what was happening penetrated the fog in the prince’s head. He roused enough to bear some of his own weight and allow them to propel him forward.
Together—banging and bumping, trading orders and cautions—they dragged the prince up the stairs to the inn’s finest guest room. On the way through the door, his knees buckled. She dropped the lantern to use both hands to help hold him up. They half carried, half dragged him to the bed and dumped him on it.
They stood side by side staring at their future king, breathing hard.
“Should we remove his boots?” she whispered, starkly aware of Nimble Jack’s broad chest rising and falling and of the mélange of intriguing male scents about him. The only light available was from the lantern she had dropped just inside the door. Its glow reflected off the plank floor, casting the upper half of the room in soft shadows. When she looked up, he was staring at her. Tall, dark and potent.
Heaven help her, she stared back…at least enough to see that the bronze disks of his eyes had warmed with a rising heat…that his lips were parted…that his shoulders seemed to grow with each ragged exhalation. She couldn’t get her breath.
The next thing she knew he was moving toward her. She stepped back. His stride lengthened and suddenly his body met hers and swept her back against the wall beside the door. The impact set a pitcher and basin on the nearby washstand rattling.
She was stunned by both the physical contact and her own lack of resistance to it. Then slowly, so slowly that she could have easily escaped, he raised both of his hands, palms out, and planted them against the wall on either side of her. There he paused, waiting, looking at her.
She lifted her face enough to search at close range the features she had somehow memorized over the course of the evening. Those eyes—molten pools of gold…that skin—sleek and drawn taut over strongly carved cheekbones…those lips—broad and neatly bordered, just inches from hers. He roused something in her, something dormant, something not altogether welcome.
She didn’t mean to do it, made no decision, formed no conscious intent. The impulse came from memories stored in her very bones and sinews that made her stretch and arch her body upward, against his.
With a sound that was half groan, half growl, he leaned in and pressed her back against the wall. His body was hot and hard but strangely not shocking against hers; the intimacy was no longer foreign. She remembered. With every breath his body moved against hers like a tide lapping, testing, caressing the shore. Her skin came alive beneath her clothes. More, she wanted more contact. She wanted to feel him.
Her desire to touch and be touched rattled her to her very core. Trembling, she shoved her hands out to the sides…palms pressed flat against the wall…below his. And suddenly she understood why his hands were there.
When she opened her eyes and looked up, her gaze fastened on his parted lips. Kisses, she remembered kisses…mouth to mouth…intimate silk and moist heat. Her lips felt hot and sensitive, expectant. She wetted them, and gasped silently when she tasted the sweetness from the rum on his breath. She swept her tongue across her lip, luring him closer…so close that she could feel his warmth radiating into her skin and his breath curling across her cheek. But his head dropped to the side, and his mouth skimmed her temple, her ear, the side of her throat. The sensations were so tentative—was he touching her or was that his breath against her skin?
Cascading sensations sent a hum through her blood and a shiver through her body. Her nipples drew taut and tingled in a way she hadn’t experienced in a very long time. Holding her breath, she pressed her breasts into him, dragging them along his ribs. He countered her motion, giving her the stimulation she sought and adding a small, tantalizing undulation of his own…one that confirmed the effect she had on him.
Heat rushed to her breasts and her sex, concentrating and intensifying the sensations so that her sensitive flesh burned with the desire for contact. When his knee probed her skirt, she instinctively let it slide between her own and gradually, savoring the yielding, parted her thighs. Steam billowed through her senses as he fitted himself against her. Breath snagged in her throat as sensation mounted like waves.
More, she wanted more.
She pulled her hands from the wall, seized his face between them, and pressed her lips to his. He went perfectly still, and something in her clicked like the switch of an electric light. She froze as reality fanned away some of the steam in her senses.
Abruptly, he peeled himself from her body, leaving her to stagger slightly as she sank back against the wall. The chilled air that invaded the space between them was a rude shock. She was trembling and felt as if her knees had turned to rubber.
Sweet Heaven. What had happened to her?
Her mind clutched at impressions: his burning stare and his hands clenched at his sides…the throb in her woman’s flesh…the prince’s vigorous snores…the open door only three feet away…
She escaped into the hall and down the steps—having to hang on to the railing to remain upright. She headed through the inn’s darkened kitchen and pulled her cloak from the rack by the door as Carson rose from his chair by the hearth. His son, half awake and protesting being dislodged from his father’s lap, clung to his leg.
“You all right, Miz Eller?” The innkeeper dragged his hands over his face, glancing toward the dim glow from the public room.
“They’re out—the lot of them.”
“Just like you planned, eh?” The innkeeper flashed a weary grin.
“Just li-ike—” her voice cracked “—I planned.”
“Want me to walk ye up to th’ house, miz?”
“No—thank you,” she said, grateful for the darkness that hid her burning face. “Morning will come too early for you as it is.” She settled the cloak around her shoulders and pulled up its hood. “And it wasn’t me that drank a hogshead of rum this night.”
“No, it weren’t.” Carson chuckled. “Ye were somethin,’ miz.”
“Yes. Well.” She paused with her hand on the door latch, before stepping out into the chilled autumn night. “I think we’d both be advised to forget everything that happened here tonight.”
2
MARIAH stewed with dread the next day, even after giving orders to turn away all callers with word that she was indisposed. So when Carson’s boy arrived in the afternoon with word that the prince had received a message that put him in a bad humor, climbed aboard his horse and ridden off to Scotland, she wilted with relief.
She had been delivered from the consequences of her brazen behavior.
She should have felt grateful, but instead she was seized by an unholy restlessness. Stalking down to the inn, she went from room to room, sorting and rearranging, clearing rooms and then moving the furniture back. Nothing pleased her. If she hadn’t feared a servant revolt, she’d have begun scrubbing walls and pounding rugs, spring-cleaning six months early.
At wits’ end, she sent for Old Farley to bring some soothing music up to the house. But she sent the old boy away again shortly after he began to play. Every note evoked the memory of a brooding golden-eyed presence.
Even a week later, the restlessness had not lessened.
Desperate to spend the tension inside her, she put on her oldest clothes and went to work in her garden one morning. The oak trees were bare, the flowers had died back, and the shrubbery—all but the balsam and holly—had surrendered to the cold and shortened days. But even here, on her knees in her beloved garden, she had trouble banishing thoughts of that night.
“Tart,” she said irritably, jamming her spade into the cold, dark earth. The autumn sun was too pale and remote to warm the ground where she was planting bulbs beside the arbor walk. Her gloves were caked with wet soil, her fingers were half frozen, and her back ached from the bending. But she was determined to set these blessed daffodils.
“That’s how you are behaving, you know. Like a tart.” She straightened onto her protesting knees. “I am not.”
Glowering, she stabbed the earth again and snatched up another handful of papery golden bulbs.
“I did nothing wrong. He accosted me.”
Though to be fair, accosted was painting it a bit black. He hadn’t kissed her. Hadn’t set hands on her. There wasn’t even a name for what he’d done to her. But it was intimate and pleasurable and furtive, which, by all decent lights, made it wrong, wrong, wrong.
And just like that, she was immersed in the memory she had tried to keep at bay and reliving those erotic sensations in the prince’s darkened sleeping room. Warmth and breath commingled…bodies pressed hard together, hungry, straining for more…Her throat tightened at the thought and her breath came quicker. It was the strange nature of the encounter, she told herself, that made it so difficult to dismiss.
Curse “Jack B. Nimble” for rousing such desires in her.
After Mason had died she had locked away that part of her. It hadn’t been easy; her worldly older husband had been a remarkable lover who tutored her expertly and boldly cultivated her passions. When he died unexpectedly, she had been blooming into her sexual prime and struggled nightly to subdue the desires he had so deftly roused. But then she learned of the entailment that placed her husband’s land in the hands of distant relatives. Left with no income, only an aging house and a coaching inn in bad repair, she had to scramble to survive and poured the energy of her stubborn desires into the hard work of remaking the inn into an establishment capable of supporting herself and her people.
The result was that the Eller-Stapleton had never looked so fine or received such brisk trade. It seemed, after two grueling years, that her life and her business were on the brink of flourishing—despite the debts she had incurred—and that was satisfaction enough.
Until a week ago.
She shoved bulb after bulb into the damp, pungent earth, each time giving the dirt above it a smack, daring the bulb to show its head until spring.
Thus occupied, she didn’t hear Carson’s boy approach.
“Miz?” She turned so sharply that she fell back on her rear, scattering the bulbs she held across the ground. Young Jamie stood with hands in his pockets and a grin on his round, cold-reddened face. “Ye got callers, miz.”
She pressed a hand to her chest to contain the racing of her heart.
“Yes? Who is it?” The cold had set her nose running. She sniffed.
“Gen’lmen. Pa said I should bring ’em up.” He stepped to the side and revealed two men standing on the path some distance away.
Mariah scowled at their caped greatcoats and black top hats. Whoever they were, they dressed like bankers. The thought made her heart seize.
She started to rise and realized her skirts were twisted around her, exposing her old woolen stockings and muddy boots. She knew there was dried dirt on her face, where she’d pushed her hair back earlier; she looked a mess. But then, she hadn’t invited them here. Clumsy from the cold, she staggered to her feet and brushed her skirts before realizing that her dirt-caked gloves were making her even more of a mess. Scowling, she pulled them off and threw them into the wooden trug that held her tools.
The men’s backs were to her; they seemed to be surveying her garden.
“You wished to see me, gentlemen?”
They turned as she approached.
She stopped dead on the path as her gaze connected with a pair of cool bronze-colored eyes and the bottom dropped out of her stomach.
Him.
“EDGAR MARCHANT, madam—Baron Marchant,” the shorter man introduced himself, tipping his hat. It took her a moment to recognize “Jack O. Lantern”…the prince’s friend with the round face and pomaded hair.
“John St. Lawrence, Mrs. Eller.” Jack B. Nimble removed his hat, and her knees weakened. Broad shoulders, dark hair, golden eyes; he was exactly as she had remembered him.
She crossed her arms and refused to give in to the panic blooming in her chest.
“Gentlemen,” she said, thinking that despite their smooth manners and expensive clothes, they were anything but.
JACK ST. LAWRENCE took in Mariah Eller’s dirt-streaked clothes and rosy, dirt-smudged cheeks. This was hardly how he expected to be received by the feisty widow. She looked like a servant girl sent out to weed the kitchen herb patch. Younger and fresher than he had recalled, and even more appealing. It was a good thing Marchant had spoken first; his own throat had tightened.
“We have come on an errand of some importance,” Marchant intoned with lordly precision. “Perhaps you would like us to return in an hour or two, so that you might have time to—” he glanced at her clothing “—prepare to receive our news.”
It was the wrong thing to say, apparently. She seemed startled by Marchant’s offer of time to make herself presentable, then offended by it. Her gaze darted to the basket by her feet; she looked as if she could gladly drive a garden tool through the baron’s heart.
Damn and blast Bertie, Jack thought, sending him on such an errand. He was used to handling matters and seeing to it that the prince’s desires were carried out. Capable and always in control, he was the perfect man for a sensitive mission. But not this mission.
He dreaded facing this woman the way he dreaded a dentist with a pair of pliers. And he didn’t want to think about why.
“Anything you have to say to me, sir, you may say here and now. As you can see—” she gestured to her bulbs and tools “—I am quite busy. I doubt there will be many more days this season suitable for planting.”
A very bad feeling developed in the pit of Jack’s stomach as her chin came up. It was his presence that raised her hackles, he was sure of it.
“At the very least, let us be seated.” Marchant gestured to a nearby pair of stone benches in a leafless bower among the hedges. After a moment she exhaled irritably and complied with the request.
Feeling stiff all over, fearing his knees might not bend, Jack waved Marchant to the seat on the bench beside her while he stood nearby.
“We bring sincerest greetings from the Prince of Wales,” Marchant declared with a smile. “No doubt you recognized him during his recent stay at your fine inn.”
“Of course,” she said, obviously still nettled.
“He has asked us to convey to you how impressed he was with your hospitality, your ingenuity and the warmth of your person,” the baron continued. “He was quite taken with you, Mrs. Eller. And he has entrusted to us a somewhat delicate—”
“Are you going to sit, Mr. St. Lawrence?” She pinned Jack with a look, her tone peppery.
God, they were making a hash of it, he thought.
“Certainly.” He sat down on the opposite bench, as far from her as he could get and still have stone beneath his bum cheeks. “As the baron has said, the prince was quite taken with you. It is rare, I can tell you, for His Highness to be so…so…”
He found himself staring into big blue eyes filled with questions and suspicions and not a little indignation. He struggled to recall the persuasions he’d practiced in his mind on the way down from Scotland.
“…so relaxed in the presence of a lady…um…”
“A lady with whom he has not established relations,” the baron supplied smoothly. “To come to the point, Mrs. Eller, the prince wishes to see you again.” He studied the puzzlement in her face and came right out with it. “He wishes to establish personal relations with you, Mrs. Eller. Very close…personal…relations. St. Lawrence and I are here to make the necessary arrangements.”
She blinked and looked from the baron to Jack.
“Relations? He wishes to have close…oh…oh, my Lord…relations with me?” Her shock was too artless not to be genuine.
Jack had the urge to knock the smirk from Marchant’s face. In the seconds it took him to master that shocking impulse, she shot to her feet.
“That is absurd. What would the prince want with a simple widow who—” She stiffened, reddening. “Take your ugly little joke back to your friends and tell them that their insult found its mark and was keenly felt.”
“Mrs. Eller!” The baron was on his feet before her, alarmed now. “This is no jest, I assure you. We have come at the behest of the Prince of Wales himself.” From the breast pocket of his coat he produced a letter as evidence. “If you doubt the authenticity of our mission, let the prince himself reassure you. You must surely see that this is not a matter he is free to undertake on his own behalf. He has entrusted both his desire and his honor to us in this matter. I assure you, we are faithful to that trust.”
She stood for a moment, regarding the letter as if it were a snake. Then with a fierce look at Jack, she took it from the baron and inspected the royal seal before breaking it open. The trembling of the paper was the only sign that what was penned on the vellum made any impact on her.
“I believe, gentlemen,” she said, sounding as if her mouth were dry, “that the events of a week ago may have given His Highness a mistaken notion of my character.”
The baron’s eyes narrowed and his oily smile appeared.
“I believe the prince knows precisely what conclusions to draw about a woman who drinks men under her table, flaunts her availability before half a dozen men at a time, and then hauls the heir to the throne into bed with her.” He tilted his head to look down his nose. “The prince has already tasted the nature of your character, madam. And you are fortunate indeed that he has found the flavor to his liking.”
“Tasted my…but…the prince…” She looked to Jack in disbelief.
He scowled pointedly at her, then looked away…hoping she would see what had to be seen…that he hadn’t disabused the prince of the idea that something had happened between him and the widow.
“This is a surprise for you, clearly,” Jack said emphatically to mask his discomfort. “But I would counsel that you think well before rejecting such an opportunity. The prince’s fancy does not usually dwell for long in one place…and yet the honor and the benefit to you may be such that you will be well-fixed for life. The prince is very generous to his friends.”
“So he is, our beloved prince,” the baron added. “Most generous.”
“An honor?” she said. “To serve as a paramour to a married man?”
“To our future monarch,” the baron corrected. “Make no mistake, madam. Ladies who serve the prince in such a personal capacity are not regarded as mere courtesans or ‘paramours.’ These ladies, great and small, serve both crown and country and are regarded with utmost respect.”
Her hand tightened visibly on the letter. She seemed to have difficulty getting her breath.
Jack scowled. She must surely understand that she had been selected for a singular honor, one that dukes of the realm actively encouraged their lady wives to seek, knowing that with fancy came favor. However, she had not been bred to the class that sought advancement above all else. The turmoil in her was disconcerting. If she truly had some moral objection—
He caught himself. Not hardly. She was hot enough for a man’s touch—even a man she had hardly met. His ears heated at the thought of how he knew that. And she was a widow, after all. It wasn’t as if she had vows to observe or a maiden-head to hoard. If she had a brain in her head she would come around quickly and take Bertie’s offer.
“Perhaps you need time to think it through,” Jack said. “To see the advantage to all sides in this arrangement.”
“Of course.” The baron leaned closer. “And while you are thinking, madam, be sure to consider the sizeable debts you have incurred on behalf of your quaint establishment. One word from the prince and your thousand-pound loan can be paid and stricken from both ledger and memory. A different word, however, could bring the note due this very day. You are surely clever enough to see the advantage in allying yourself to such power.”
“I believe she has the idea,” Jack said, stepping back and pulling the baron out of her way. “Shall we call for your answer, say, at four-thirty?”
Rigid with control, she picked up her garden tools, set them in a nearby wheelbarrow, then stalked off down the path to the house. The shush of pea gravel under her feet sounded uncannily like the swish of silk petticoats. Jack felt a curious clutch in his chest at the thought.
When she disappeared into the house, he came to his senses and found Marchant wearing a smug expression.
“What are you smiling about?” he asked the wily baron.
“She’s a hot one, all right.” The baron thumped his arm. “But I can’t say I envy Bertie the trouble she’ll be.”
“If she agrees.” He stuck his hat on his head and struck off down the path to the inn.
“Oh, she’ll agree,” the baron said with a wicked chuckle, falling in beside him. “Her eyes lit like Fawkes’ Night bonfires when I said the word debts. Take a lesson, Jack my boy. Money trumps morality every time.”
3
“I WANT a fire, a brandy and a bath,” Mariah declared as she burst into the kitchen and ripped off her jacket, muffler and rubber boots. “Now.”
The household staff—cook, butler, housemaid and kitchen boy—stared in confusion at her and then at each other. Brandy? At noon?
Robert, her stoop-shouldered butler, who more closely resembled a question mark with each passing year, shuffled off mumbling and squinting as he thrust his keys to arm’s length to fish for the one that opened the liquor cabinet. Her rotund maid-of-all-work, Mercy, trudged up the stairs to light the boiler in the bathing room, pausing to rub her back along the way so that her mistress would see how the extra work aggravated her lumbago. Aggie, her ancient cook, stood gaping as Mariah ordered afternoon tea for three and instructed her to send to the butcher for a prime cut of braising beef.
“I’m of a mind to sink my teeth into some red meat tonight,” Mariah declared, seizing her brandy and stomping up the stairs.
Old Robert and even older Aggie exchanged looks. They hadn’t been asked to serve red meat at Eller House since the old master had died. That combined with spirits-drinking and bath-taking in the middle of the week—the middle of the day!—confirmed that something unusual was happening.
It was almost as if the old master, Squire Eller, was back. The aged retainers shook their heads with wistful smiles. Those were the days. Old Mason had a streak in him, he did. Demanded his fun. Accompanied by a sizeable belt of brandy before and a hunk of juicy beefsteak after.