Blake groaned. “No bartering, either,” he muttered, leaning over her so she could see his face against the darkness.
Before she could argue, he kissed her.
24
After a tedious evening of society, Blake decided he deserved some recompense. His wife had been the most enchanting woman in the room, devil take her deceitful soul. He needed to vent his frustrations, but he could not yell at a woman who was still—despite all his protests—attempting to make a pet lapdog of him.
So he sought the one solace he longed for—her beautiful mouth. Jocelyn’s sweet, eager kisses sang songs in Blake’s misbegotten soul. His wife had become like a drug in his veins, one he could not resist. He despised weakness and would work to overcome this one—later, when he was less frustrated.
She briefly shoved at his chest—no doubt still peeved at him. But in moments her lace gloves slid around his neck and her light fragrance of lavender enfolded him. He took advantage of her proximity to nibble her earlobe and press kisses down her slender throat until she wriggled closer, nearly sitting on his lap. He loved that, despite all her reservations, she snuggled willingly into his arms.
Even knowing better, Blake still had the urge to carry her to bed. His normally competent wits rang clarion warnings, but her kisses had wiped out the reasons why. He wasn’t meant to be a monk. She was his wife. He almost persuaded himself that they’d learn to rub along better once they satisfied their lust.
As the horses jerked to a halt in front of the house, Blake glanced up from ravishing his wife to see the blaze of lamps lit in every window.
Jocelyn peered around him, saw the lights, and nearly climbed over him to reach the door. “Something is wrong!” she declared. “Hurry.”
Remembering French intruders with broken heads, Blake kicked open the carriage door, jumped down, and hauled Jocelyn out before a postboy could let down the stairs. He had to grapple for his coin purse to pay the driver while she flew through the gateway and up the walk.
Duty performed, he strode rapidly after Jocelyn. In his experience with his own family, domestic crises were usually resolved without his aid, but perhaps if he settled this one swiftly, his wife might be returned to a receptive mood—
He forgot that pleasant thought upon entering the narrow foyer and cracking his shin on a large wooden crate. He could hear the maid and footman shouting at each other in the back of the house, out of sight. Jocelyn’s usually unruffled tones were sharp and anxious in response. But he could not rush forward to end the dispute without falling over a few dozen containers and the unfamiliar woman bent over them, obliviously unpacking books and papers and stacking them across the floor.
Giving up any hope of sweeping Jocelyn off her feet and into bed, Blake politely removed his hat and bowed. “Good evening, madam.” He could not be faulted for ending on a questioning note. He was fairly certain he’d never met the woman before.
With strands of long gray hair slipping from beneath a cap that oddly sported a quill tucked into a ribbon, the rail-thin lady studied him for a moment. “Tony’s brother is back,” she announced before gesturing at an unopened box. “I’m sure it’s in that one. If you would be so good?”
She handed him a crowbar.
Before Blake could decide if he was disarming a lunatic, aiding a trespasser, or rescuing someone locked in a box, Jocelyn reappeared. “Mother, what did you say to Richard? He is not anywhere about, and he
promised
he would not leave without me.”
Mother?
Blake suffered a foreboding that warned him to head for his loft
now
, but proper etiquette had been ingrained in him since birth. He waited expectantly for an introduction.
“I merely told him that Harold boasted he’d sold Africa to the greengrocer in town. He would have found out anyway. We need to remove these crates to the study, where they belong. I think I should like the rose bedroom, if you do not mind. It has a good view of the river in winter.” She took the crowbar from Blake and attacked the container she’d ordered him to open.
“You told Richard where to find Africa
at this hour
?” Jocelyn cried.
Blake had had just about enough of being ignored. He grabbed the crowbar and stopped the destruction of the crate. Both women turned to stare at him in bewilderment.
“Lady Carrington?” he asked in a voice heavy with irony.
Jocelyn stepped upon a container between them and flung her arms around his neck. He’d be gratified except he knew she wanted something and that it would be directly opposed to his own desires. But her breasts pressing against his chest had a way of distracting his wits. If this was her method of settling arguments, he might grow used to it.
“I’m so sorry, Blake. I did not mean to immerse you in our family dramas so soon. I’ll take care of it, I promise. Shall I have Molly bring you a brandy and light a fire in the study? Please, ignore all this—”
Damn it all!
She would never learn he did not want coddling like the rest of her harebrained relations. He cut her off by squeezing her close, stealing a quick kiss, and setting her back on the floor. “I do not want brandy if Richard is missing. Africa is his bird, I take it?”
He refrained from rolling his eyes at the family squabble that ensued—joined by the maid’s protests—and applied himself to keeping the crowbar from Lady Carrington, who evidently meant to take squatter’s possession of his home by emptying her treasures in the front foyer. And everyone called the lady an
invalid
? He’d hate to see the dowager viscountess in full health then.
Once Blake had sorted through the recriminations and had the story, he assigned the footman to carry the boxes to the carriage house, ordered the maid to douse the lamps, and donned his hat again.
“I’ll find Richard. You settle your mother,” he told Jocelyn, who looked ready to follow him out the door.
“Richard won’t go with you,” she said worriedly, twisting her hands. “I’m the one he trusts.”
“Then he needs to learn to trust me. You cannot go out at this hour.” He glared sternly at her. “Remember, I told you, I have my uses. And I don’t need
coddling.
”
Blake stalked out, and Jocelyn nearly wept in panic. In the past, Richard’s wanderings had caused hysterical arguments in every home they’d ever lived in. His disappearances—and the ensuing search and anxiety—were one of the many reasons Harold had threatened to lock him up and her brothers-in-law had thrown them out.
She couldn’t be thrown out of this home.
Blinking back tears as she repeated that refrain, Jocelyn steadied her shaking fingers on the newel post. This home was
hers
.
And instead of shouting and complaining like the rest of her family, Blake had stepped in to help. She hadn’t asked him to accept responsibility for her burdens—he simply had. That raised a very odd sensation in her neglected heart.
She regarded her mother with resignation. “You could have given me some warning, Mother,” she said with a sigh. “I thought you were happy with Elizabeth.”
“Nonsense, dear, this is home. You’ve chosen a fine young man, but really, we can’t put my papers outside. We’ve always kept them in the study. If you’ll help—”
“No, Mother, the study is Blake’s. He does important work there. We’ll figure out something in the morning. Did they carry your trunks to the rose bedroom? Let’s see if they’ve been unpacked. How was your journey? You look well.”
With each sentence or question, she steered her mother away from the crates and up the stairs. She desperately wished to go in search of Richard, but Blake was right—again. Even a simple village could be dangerous at this late hour. She prayed Richard was safe and would not hide if he saw Blake coming.
She settled her mother in the rose bedroom at the back of the house, had Molly bring up hot tea and start a fire in the grate, while listening for the sound of Blake and Richard returning. She didn’t know how many nights she’d spent fretting over her brother while soothing her mother or sisters. It felt extremely odd to have someone sharing the responsibility that had been solely hers these last six years, and longer.
“It is very hard to trace Charlemagne’s origins,” Lady Carrington complained, settling into bed with her tea tray. “It is quite unfair that Tony’s brother might come and go from France when I am the one who must talk with scholars there.”
Antoinette’s brother was French and probably had not visited in years. With a war going on, a journey back in time would be just as likely as one to France, but Jocelyn bit back a retort. At least she understood her mother. Lady Carrington was a historian who took comfort in a past of medieval courts and kings. Would Blake comprehend her mother’s peculiarity?
Jocelyn could appreciate that dealing with family eccentricities might make Blake cynical, but her case was the exact opposite of his. While the Montagues huddled together, chirruping sympathetically to one another over any disaster, the Carringtons followed their own independent interests to the exclusion of all else, including one another.
She’d unwittingly followed that familiar path when she’d paid off Harold without consulting Blake. In her experience, trusting others was a road to ruin. How would she ever explain that to her white knight? Or learn to change her ways?
If Blake would just bring Richard safely home and not threaten to throw her out on her ear, she would figure it out.
Blake returned in the wee hours of the morning with a weeping Richard and no parrot. If he hadn’t suspected something wasn’t quite right about the boy before, he knew it now, although he could not quite analyze the difficulty. He just knew no normal lad of seventeen would ingeniously determine the best way of breaking into the greengrocer’s at midnight without causing alarm, then do nothing more than wander about, calling loudly for a bird.
It had taken powers of persuasion Blake had not known he’d possessed to prevent the grocer from waking the magistrate, and to convince Richard to come home. Having to leave the bird behind once it had been discovered had compounded the difficulty.
As Blake guided Richard into the now empty foyer, the sight of Jocelyn asleep in one of the ancient chairs in the front room added to Blake’s aggravation. Rationally, he understood that none of this situation was her fault. He would like nothing better than to shake every member of the Carrington family until what little wits they possessed fell out their ears for leaving Jocelyn, their next to youngest, to deal with her addlepated brother and mother.
But in every other way, Blake was reduced to the towering fury of a tantrum-throwing toddler. His life was meant to be sane. Orderly. Following the path of intellectual pursuits. Cryptology appealed to him because it made perfectly logical sense.
People didn’t.
“You made Jocelyn cry,” he scolded Richard. “You promised you would stay home, and you scared her when you weren’t here. I don’t want you to do that again, do you understand?”
Richard nodded miserably, although Blake suspected the boy did not fully comprehend and might not even remember in the morning. He needed to have a little talk with his
wife
about Richard’s limitations.
“Go up to your room. We’ll talk about Africa in the morning.”
This time, Richard nodded a little more eagerly. As the lad hurried for the stairs, Blake sighed and turned to his sleeping bride. She hadn’t changed out of her elegant evening gown, but her hair was tumbling from its pins, and red creases marred her cheek where it had been pressed into the rough fabric of the chair.
He turned the lamp down to its lowest setting, placed it on a stand so he could see the stairs, then lifted Jocelyn into his arms. She stirred and snuggled close to his chest, murmuring,
“Richard?”
“He’s safe,” Blake assured her.
That was apparently all she needed to hear before curling up against him and falling back to sleep. Blake had to wonder how exhausted she must be to sleep so heavily no matter where she lay. The second day of their marriage had admittedly been wearying. He couldn’t take advantage of her exhaustion.
He had to keep reminding himself that behind his wife’s delicate beauty lurked a deceptive mind. He shouldn’t feel sorry for her. Instead, he was wondering just what kind of life she must have had with a dotty mother, a felonious older brother, three apparent harpies for sisters, and a younger brother with wits to let.
That didn’t mean he had to encourage her deceptive practices or allow her to work her sticky web around him. He had a purpose that ran counter to hers.
Carrying his sleeping beauty up the stairs, he nearly tripped over a wandering kitten, came down hard on his weak leg, and cursed before righting himself again. He ought to be awarded medals for surviving the combat zone he now called home.
He wasn’t thirty yet. There was still time to get himself killed by kittens, stairs, and French thieves before his next birthday.
25
Jocelyn woke with her corset crushed into her breast and a man’s heavy arm around her waist. She inhaled sharply and went from groggy to wide awake in an instant.
Beneath the covers pulled up to her shoulders, she was still wearing her evening gown, although it and the corset had been loosened, exposing a scandalous amount of bosom. She squirmed, and the arm at her waist tightened.
“Don’t move. I’m not awake yet,” Blake grumbled from behind her.
“Then you need to do a better job of unfastening me,” she countered, wriggling to adjust the corset stay that was cutting into her flesh.
A male hand instantly tugged at her back laces, loosening them before she could scarce take a breath at his audacity.
“You found Richard,” she said, seeking confirmation that she had not dreamed hearing him last night. Or dreamed of being carried up the steps.