The Bad Baron's Daughter (13 page)

“Very true, my good man. Parliament should look to it,” agreed Linden readily. “But perhaps if we bargain with her, we could persuade her to accept a more reasonable offer. What do you say to thirty pounds, wench?”

“Not enough,” said Katie, wishing that the street would open and swallow her.

“Well, I niver ‘eard th’ like,” exclaimed the sailor, “not in all me born days. Not ta say she ain’t no prime armful, but ain’t no woman worth no fifty pounds.”

“You are a sage, sir,” said Linden, regarding Katie smolderingly. “And I am fully in agreement. Yet…” He ran his gaze slowly down the length of Katie’s slender frame. “As you say, she’s a prime armful.” He drew a fifty-pound note from his coat and leaned over to tuck it into the bosom of Katie’s gown. “I think I am compelled to experiment with your theory. Come, wench, up with you. Let’s see just how far short of your price you fall.” He put out an imperious hand and pulled Katie up to sit beside him on the phaeton with a force that nearly wrenched her arm from its socket.

“That’s th’ wicket, guvnor,” cheered the grizzled sailor. “Show th’ uppity jade wot it’s for!”

“That,” said Linden grimly as he snapped the reins, “you may be sure of.”

They rode without speaking for a few minutes before Katie turned to Lord Linden and said contritely, “You’re mad at me, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

Linden had a certain genius for injecting mountains of meaning into a monosyllable. Katie subsided into a snubbed silence. She twisted her head to look at Andrew, who signaled his sympathy and grimaced at Linden behind his back. “Courage, Peaches,” he mouthed.

When they arrived at Laurel’s house, Andrew ran up to take charge of the horses.

“Walk ‘em, Drew,” Linden ordered, and assisted Katie into Laurel’s library with a roughness quite in keeping with his callous reputation. Once there, he took Katie’s shoulders, thrust her into one of the despised sphinx settees and stood regarding her as though she were a particularly obnoxious bug that he would enjoy swatting.

“Do you know,” he asked conversationally, “what I would like to do to you?”

“Something painful?” suggested Katie in a small voice.

“Something very painful,” agreed Lord Linden.

“Did you not like it that I went out by myself?”

“No. I did not.” Those crushing monosyllables again.

“I’m sorry.”

Lord Linden dropped beside Katie on the settee and ran one finger slowly across the bridge of her nose. “I would like to make you much, much sorrier but, unfortunately, this country has a legal system that refuses to smile upon the horsewhipping of girls in their teens, no matter how justified. A… pity.”

Katie’s shoulders sagged and she leaned her head back against the tapestry-worked upholstery. It was hard to settle comfortably with the straw bonnet on, so Linden untied the wide satin ribbon and pulled off the bonnet. Katie’s hair tumbled to her shoulders.

“I wanted to go to
The Merry Maidenhead
to ask Zack if Papa had sent him a message for me yet. But he hasn’t,” said Katie, trying to keep the hurt from her voice. “Laurel said that I shouldn’t bother you about it and besides, it gave me the feeling that I was doing
something
toward finding my father. But I wouldn’t have gone if I’d known that you wouldn’t like it. I owe you so much; I would never wish to distress you.” It was an artless speech uttered in a pitifully conciliatory voice that might have wrung tears from a stump. On Lord Linden’s handsome countenance it had no softening effect.

“Katie. You grow tiresome,” he said coldly. “There is a man somewhere in this city who would like very much to free you from your rather unhappy mortal existence. If you wander about the city alone, then you may be sure that he will do so. Furthermore, this is London, not Essex, and young women do not traverse the streets without some kind of attendant unless they wish to be mistaken for members of the muslin company. Nor do they pass their time in earnest chats with every chance-met male who feels inclined to accost them. What would you have done if he had
had
fifty pounds?”

Katie remembered then that she still had Lord Linden’s fifty-pound note stuck into her bodice so she drew it out and handed it back to her benefactor. “I don’t know,” she said sheepishly, “but it wouldn’t have mattered, would it? The sailor thought fifty pounds exorbitant—I don’t think anything could have induced him to part with that sum. Besides,” she added, a flash of spirit animating her lustrous blue eyes, “if I ignored
all
chance-met males, I should never have become acquainted with you.”

“A fine example,” said Linden sarcastically. “I almost raped you. Doesn’t that tell you anything?”

“ ‘Twas only because you were quite drunk at the time,” said Katie, looking up at him placatingly.

“Of all the obtuse… is that really what you think? Is that why you’ve stayed within my protection, because you thought I was safe when sober?” Involuntarily, Linden’s hands rose to Katie’s shoulders and he pulled her close against his chest. “Little idiot. Don’t you realize that when men look at you, they feel like the prize stallion on a stud farm?” He let his hand glide deliberately from Katie’s shoulder down the soft cup of her breast until it rested on her curving hip. He heard a tiny, startled gasp in her throat as though she had suddenly needed to fill her lungs with air; her breathing changed its pace, quickening imperceptibly. Her clear, jewel-like eyes were as readable as any child’s, emotions filtering through them like bright water sparkling over stones in a stream. She was struggling with herself. He could see she wanted to push his hand away, and it was so hard for her to do, hypnotized as she was by the pleasure his touch fed her.

The cold highlights in Linden’s eyes seemed to dim, then glow.

“Katie,” he said softly. “My quaint, silly darling. You’re sorry; you hope I don’t mind; you don’t want to distress me. Look up at me, little virgin. That’s right, my dear. Hush, I won’t hurt you.” Carefully, carefully, he pressed a light, lazy kiss on Katie’s trembling lips. His fingers played slowly with a red-gold lock of hair which curled over the rise of her cheek. A shiver of fear and longing disturbed her sweet, high cheekbone; he brushed it away with his searching lips. She felt a warm relaxing sensation flooding over her, as if she had been brought from a cold winter storm and set in front of a roaring fire. Her lips parted softly, and were covered by his in a long, caressing kiss. Now she was floating, out of her body, and reached an arm around his shoulder as if to anchor herself safely in this sweep of passion. He fit her closer to his hard body, savoring her yielding softness, her stunned surrender; his lips moved hungrily over the fragrant curve of her neck, whispering her name over and over as if it were a magic charm that would increase his power over her until, finally, she would be his. He told her that he wanted her, that she shouldn’t be afraid, that he would help her, please her. One of his hands pressed firmly on her back, his facile fingers opening first one and then another of the buttons that bound her inside her dress, and his lips moved up to her ear, murmuring reassurances.

But the library’s japanned rosewood door swung open on its well-oiled hinges, banging into the wall with a crack that caused Katie to jump nearly out of her half-buttoned dress. It was, in Linden’s opinion, at least, a bad moment for Laurel to enter the library. In fact, one might shy from so mild an expression as “enter” because Laurel’s advent was more in the nature of an invasion. She whirled angrily into the room, her silk skirts flushed and scolding, her hands clenched into fists. A bad moment indeed.

“Don’t disengage on my account.
I’ve
no objection to the public celebration of fertility rites,” she said snappishly.

“Plague take you, Laurel, don’t you know how to knock?” There was a range of emotions in Lord Linden’s voice. Regretfully, shame was not among them.

“Why, Lesley, this is
my
house. But you misinterpret, my dear. I merely came to ask if you might like to use my bed upstairs? Perhaps little Katie would care to borrow one of my negligees?” asked Laurel, all civil sarcasm.

Linden smiled. It was that particularly unpleasant, one-sided smile that made
la
Steele long to scratch it from his face. “I don’t need a bed or a negligee, sweet; I’m not so fastidious.”

“No, you aren’t, are you?” snarled Laurel. “You’re a vicious, self-indulgent rakeshame and well I know it! How you screamed at me an hour past for letting your precious Katie go out in London unattended and then stamped off to find her without so much as a by your leave. And now, after all your damned lies that the wench is purer than the untrodden snow…” She came to a choking halt, overcome by temper.

“She is
still
pure as the untrodden snow,” snapped Linden, his voice taut with exasperation. “I knew I should have locked the door.”

“And I suppose you brought the chit to my library intending to seduce her? Lesley,” said Laurel, turning purple under her rouge, “how could you?”

“How could I? Well, you jealous bitch, it’s not easy, with people bursting into the room like Roman candles and Katie gazing up at me as though I were the archangel Gabriel. Damnation, I brought the chit to your house precisely because I didn’t intend to seduce her. But I’m not a damned gelding. Oh, Jesus, why couldn’t I have been born eighty and impotent?” said Linden acidly to the room at large. “No, here, Katie, you’ve put the wrong button in that hole. Put your hands in your lap, I’ll do it. Damn you, child, if you shrink away from me like that I swear I’ll box your ears; it’s obvious that I’m not going to do anything with Laurel whining at me. That fastidious, I am… sneck up Laurel, I know you think I’m incorrigible, you’ve told me so enough times in the past; but I’ll be damned if I’m going to apologize to you for my morals. Katie, if ever I attempt you again, I want you to lay hands on the nearest blunt object and fetch me a good, swift blow in the head. Without a doubt, little one, you must be penance on me for the sins of a past life.”

“Penance for a past Me?” interrupted Laurel waspishly. “You have more than enough to answer for in this life, I assure you!”

“Go to the devil,” retorted Linden, and strode from the room.

For the second time that day, the door to the library was banged with a savage energy that could be felt even on the upper floor, where, in Laurel’s sumptuous bedroom, the shock sent the ostrich plumes of the enormous tent bed into wild swooping waves.

It had been fortunate for Katie that Lord Linden had behaved with such unrepentant rudeness to Laurel; thus he drew the greatest portion of that affronted lady’s wrath on his own graceless head and so saved Katie all but an absent-minded scold. Katie could understand Linden no better now: the restless, uncertain temper that could change in one devastating second to a sweet seductive tenderness that made her feel as though she were swimming in volcanic honey. Part of her saw him as the knight in armor who had saved her life twice, but the clear-headed voice of her conscience told her that his actions in the library lent color to Zack’s unsavory accusations that Linden had only saved her so that he might use her himself. Dear, dangerous Lord Linden. Katie knew that she must somehow remove herself from his tempting vicinity soon or decide that virtue was well lost for love. No! It wouldn’t be, couldn’t be, because tomorrow always comes, and Lord, Lord, what would life be like when he tired of her?

But she knew now, as she had always known, that her halcyon days as Linden’s
cygne noir
were a transitory arrangement. Already, it seemed he had tired of playing King Cophetua to her beggar-maid, because on the morning after the scene in the library, which Antoinette referred to as the Battle of the Titans, Linden sent Laurel a curt note informing her that he had to go to Dorset for a few days and that if she threw Katie out, he wouldn’t pay the tab on her diamonds.

“The wretch,” Laurel said, after reading the note. “I suppose he’s gone to some horrid sparring match. Was there ever a more cynical, irresponsible scoundrel? He’s supposed to be looking for your father. What’s to be done with the man?”

What indeed? If anyone had told Laurel, or even the reverential Katie, that Linden was engaged in that very quest, they would have been incredulous.

Some four afternoons later, Katie and Antoinette sat opposite each other at an inlaid game table, playing
Piquet au Cent
for
la
Steele’s hairpins. Antoinette had decided that the blond salon on the upper floor would be the most comfortable place to play. There was a fine framed window there that let in the drowsy late afternoon sunlight and this was the first day in many without the dismal fog. Antoinette soon discovered that this idyllic spot had its disadvantages; this same fine window directly overlooked the small scoop of carriageway, and each time a vehicle passed beneath, Katie jumped up and ran to the window. This became a major irritant to Antoinette, especially since she was losing. When, for the third time within a quarter hour, the snap-rumble of cart wheels came down the street, Antoinette checked Katie before she could rise.

“
Eh bien, petite
, enough! Anyone with ears can tell that is not a carriage of fashion. Do you think my Lord Linden will arrive in a farm wagon pulled by a fat dobbin? Have done, and lead your last card,
s’il vous plait
.”

“As you will, Antoinette, here. The nine of clubs. Oh, can you not take it? You should have retained your diamond jack, you see?”

“
Vraiment
? Do you think that I am a stupid that you must tell me that? It is the height of discourtesy to criticize the play of another. How many points have you? Seventy? And the capot as well!” Antoinette flung up her hands. “That’s it then, you take this rubber. And may I say that it is not at all comfortable that a child your age should play the
piquet
so well, like the Greek
banditti
. This lose, lose, lose, it puts me off!”

“Would you like me to let you win for a while?” asked Katie, the soul of amiability.