Looking at her, Thorn suddenly understood what could lead a man to break all the rules of civility in order to bind a woman to him. Put India’s intelligence and passion together with her shapeliness, her mouth, her laugh, even that beauty mark . . . she was enough to drive a man to madness.
“You must tell me the moment that Vander proposes,” he said.
She frowned. “Are you saying I need your blessing?”
“We must not kiss after you are promised to another.”
“You’re implying . . .”
He grinned at her, Lala wasn’t his yet, and India wasn’t Vander’s yet. So he kissed her.
But something still bothered him. “You were not walking easily earlier today,” he said, tracing her lower lip with his finger.
India’s eyes had a desirous look that made him long to push her backward and simply thrust into her. Not that he would, but he wanted to.
Oh God, did he want to.
“I didn’t what?”
“When you walked around the drawing room with Vander . . . your movement was rather stiff.”
The dazed expression in her eyes disappeared; she straightened and scowled at him. But her lip was swollen from his kisses, and her frown just made him harder, hungrier. Still . . . he had to know.
“You walked as if you had been a virgin last night,” he said flatly.
It was one thing if Lady Xenobia India was a loose woman, practiced in the arts of shaking the sheets, taking her pleasure where she would. He would never fault a woman for that, any more than he would fault himself.
But if he had seduced a virgin . . . Actually, there was something oddly relieving about the thought. He’d have to marry her. They would fight all the time. They’d probably make each other miserable. But he would have no other choice.
“India?” It came out like a command, though he had meant it only as a question.
She picked up a heavy fall of silky hair and pushed it behind one shoulder. “I fail to see why I should share the history of my intimacies with you. As I told you, I was not a virgin.”
He watched her carefully. “I don’t know if I believe you.”
She jumped to her feet. She looked outraged, like Juno fighting with Jupiter. This could be his life. He couldn’t help himself, and grinned at her, which just made her angrier.
“You are insisting that I say this aloud again? Then I will. You were not the first.”
Well, that was definite. Thorn was well aware that his pang of disappointment was absurd. He had forced her to admit something that no lady would wish to announce. He was an oaf, a thoughtless, mannerless oaf.
“I’m an idiot,” he admitted. “I thought you were walking stiffly.”
She gave him one last furious glance and turned on her heel. “I shall return to the house in the pony cart, and you can find your own way back, Mr. Dautry.” With that, she was gone.
Thorn climbed the stairs and entered the nursery. Rose was curled on her side, arms around Antigone, all that duckling hair of hers spread over the covers. He leaned down and kissed her good-night.
Instead of returning to the main house, he walked to the gatehouse, to the bedchamber where he’d bedded India the night before.
He stripped to the skin, because that’s the way he always slept, and slipped naked between sheets that still had the faintest scent of India. She had called her perfume “moonflower.” He’d never heard of it.
They probably didn’t have moonflowers in London; certainly there were no flowers down by the Thames. He lay awake, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling for a long time.
Perhaps it was time to put the Thames behind him. He was tired of measuring his life by whether a mudlark would have known what a moonflower was. Who cared? At the heart of it, the really important point was that India smelled like a woman beneath that delicate trace of flower.
Not just any woman, either: India. Spicy, sweet, bold, desirous.
He’d never had a woman like her before. Even thinking of the way she moaned, low in her throat, made him harden to the point of pain.
Yet his life was planned. There was no space for a woman who made him feel unmoored. He had to shovel all this feeling back into a hole in the ground and bury it.
It wasn’t healthy. Some madness was making him imagine, over and over, the journey from the gatehouse to the main house. A quiet trip up the stairs, a left turn, and straight to India’s bedchamber.
She slept deeply, and she wouldn’t wake when he entered the room. Not until he drew back the covers and slid into the bed, naked, ready, his hands slipping beneath her nightdress. Even the thought of touching her limbs made his cock throb.
And that slapped him back to reality. Had he lost his mind? One woman and one night, and he forgot reason and logic? He wasn’t a gentleman, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t have an obligation to Lala.
He did.
Plus India was exactly what Vander wanted. They would have a marriage like that between his father and Eleanor. Exactly what Vander had talked of. Their children would have India’s hair.
He and Lala . . . well, they wouldn’t. She wasn’t a simpleton, the way everyone in the ton thought, but she wasn’t India, either. They would have children as well.
It was unfortunate that the thought of babies with Lala’s timid expression, even if they had her dazzling beauty, made him feel slightly queasy, but that was the truth of it. He would be kind to his wife, and she would follow him about the way a duckling follows its mother, quiet, docile, obedient . . . sweet and fluffy.
Thorn reared up, punched his pillow violently, and lay back down. No more kissing India, touching India, making love to India . . .
That was for Vander now.
Chapter Twenty-four
The next day India didn’t see Thorn until evening. She spent a less-than-wonderful morning talking to Lala and her mother, who had come downstairs for a few hours before retreating back to her bed. And in the afternoon she helped Rose create an elaborate schoolroom from paper, complete with a bookshelf and fireplace.
“Where on earth have you been?” she asked, as Thorn came into the drawing room before supper.
“The factory. Look at this, India.” He pulled something from his pocket and showed her a queer-looking string that seemed to form a closed circle, without a knot or seam.
“What is it?”
“It’s your band.”
“What?”
“The band you wanted. Made of rubber. We were able to solve the problem once we made it small, which I never considered.” He gave her a smile so glowing that India’s heart actually thumped.
She took the band and stretched it. “This is brilliant,” she said, muttering because she was thinking of all the ways she could use it. “Can you make me more? I’d like one about half this size, and one twice as large too.”
He started laughing, which caught the attention of the whole party. They all came over and stood around, admiring the band.
Lala was particularly enthralled. Her eyes became very bright, and she came up with a plan to put the ear trumpet Dr. Hatfield used to listen to people’s chests on a band around his neck. “He kept putting it down,” she told everyone, “and some houses are not as clean as they might be.”
“Does the ear trumpet have articulated joints?” Thorn asked her, after which he and Lala got into a long discussion about whether it would be possible to create a flexible tube, using Thorn’s galvanized rubber, that would preserve sound better than the current model.
Eleanor had invited Dr. Hatfield to dinner as a thank you for his faithful attendance on the convalescent Lady Rainsford; once he arrived and they were all seated at the table, Thorn brought up the ear trumpet again.
Secretly—and shamefully—India became rather cross as she watched Lala become a shining, smiling woman who easily held the attention of her end of the table. Vander had made no bones about finding the subject boring—that is, until Lala pointed out that if the trumpet was
modified to have a longer tube of rubber, one might be able to listen to horse’s hearts. Or even stomachs, to see whether they might have colic.
Thorn wasn’t seated beside India tonight; he was across the table. Their eyes met once, and he gave her a little frown. She turned away and managed to get into an interesting conversation with his father about the recent income tax Pitt had established.
When supper concluded, and the women retired to the drawing room, India tried to decide whether she could sneak away to pay another visit to Rose. If she went to the dower house once again, Thorn might assume that she was sending him a message. Flirting with him.
Instead she sat down and wrote Rose a little goodnight story about Lord Parsley, which she gave to Fleming with a request that it be delivered to the dower house.
She felt a bit wistful, remembering how she had told Rose that she would tell her more of the story in person.
But it was better this way.
The last thing a motherless little girl needed was to form an attachment to a woman she’d never see again.
Chapter Twenty-five
After breakfast the following morning, Lala went upstairs and seated herself on a hassock in her mother’s bedchamber, appearing to be a dutiful daughter while in reality she dreamed of being a country doctor’s wife. It wasn’t as if Dr. Hatfield lived in a hovel. He had pointed out his house to her, and it was a perfectly respectable house in the middle of the village, with a picket fence and likely a garden in back.
If they were married, he would help her with the accounts. True, he’d said she would never learn to read, but he didn’t make it seem like a criticism; his words didn’t lash her the way the various tutors her father had hired had done.
No one ever understood that she had spent hours and hours trying to memorize letters that twisted into little dragons and leapt off the page, or slid sideways as if water had suddenly drenched the ink. No amount of staring or repetition would stop them from moving.
“If you don’t do something, you will lose Mr. Dautry,” her mother remarked, from the bed.
Lala started.
“Did you hear what I said?” Her mother’s voice was rising, which was never a good sign. “My maid has told me everything that’s going on in this house!”
“I did hear you, Mama,” Lala said. “You are concerned that Mr. Dautry is no longer interested in me.” She couldn’t bring herself to point out that a few days ago her mother had been appalled at the very idea.
The problem was that Mr. Dautry was a terrifying man. The idea of marrying him made her shudder, though she was not afraid that he would say cruel things to her. He was frighteningly large, overly masculine—but not cruel. He might feel silent scorn for her, but he would never speak the words aloud.
“I think that Mr. Dautry and I are forming an acquaintanceship,” she said lamely.
“Apparently the servants think that Dautry is tupping that hopeless excuse for a lady, Xenobia St. Clair,” her mother replied acidly.
“Mother!” Sometimes her mother was the perfect embodiment of a royal lady-in-waiting, and one could not imagine a vulgarity crossing her lips. And sometimes . . . she wasn’t.
“Don’t be a fool, Lala. You’re not a child in the schoolroom any longer. Even in the short period I was downstairs I saw the way his eyes followed her across the room. And Brody’s as well. She’s had Dautry, mark my words. No man looks at a woman that way unless he’s known her between the sheets.”
“Mama, you mustn’t,” Lala cried. “Don’t say these things. Lady Xenobia is all that is good and kind. I know that she supports Mr. Dautry’s courtship of me. She as much as told me so!”
“She’s playing a sly game. She doesn’t want the bastard, of course. She can do better, and she’s going for the duke. I wouldn’t be surprised if she were sleeping with both of them.”
Lala gasped.
“At the same time,” her mother added.
There are times in a woman’s life when she has to make a stand. But years of feeling stupid and fearful crowded in on Lala, and she couldn’t think of anything to say that would have an effect. Her mother wasn’t even looking at her; she was propped up in her bed, looking at her face in a small hand mirror.
Without a word, Lala got up and left the room, closing the door precisely behind her. She went downstairs and asked Fleming for her pelisse. “I shall accompany Dr. Hatfield on his rounds,” she told him. “I would like a carriage brought around immediately.”
Lala never said imperious things like that. Never.
She did not permit herself to cry in the carriage on the way to the village, and when she reached the doctor’s house, she stepped out and waved the carriage away, even though the groom wanted to approach the house for her.
Her heart was pounding. He had to be home.
He was not home.
A harassed-looking maid opened the door, and almost screamed, “I’m sorry, but the doctor can’t help right now, miss. He’s gone out on a birthing, and the waiting room’s full.” Lala heard a cacophony coming from the room just off the entryway, a baby wailing and people barking at each other.
He wasn’t there. Still, he would have to return at some point, and she had nowhere else to go but Starberry Court—and she did not want to do that. Besides, without a carriage, she had no way to return until the doctor appeared.
She walked past the maid into the entry, and took off her pelisse. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Sarah,” the maid said, taking Lala’s pelisse. “But, miss, really, unless it’s an emergency, you mustn’t wait. The doctor’s been out all night, and I don’t know when he’ll be back. It wouldn’t be proper for you to be in there with the rest of them.”
“I shall see if I can help,” Lala said briskly. “Why don’t you bring some tea?”
“Tea?” Sarah was clearly at the end of her rope.
Lala opened the door to the waiting room and took a quick glance. Then she said, “Please bring some hot water, Sarah, and some cotton bandaging. Let’s see if we can get that boy’s knee cleaned up before the doctor returns.”
Dr. John Hatfield was weary to his very marrow. He’d been up all night and had nearly lost the child. Even now, he wasn’t sure the infant would survive.
His house would be erupting with patients, as it always was on a Sunday. The poor of West Drayton waited as long as they possibly could to see a doctor; when they had their half day, they skipped church and the public house, and came to him instead.
He really should hire an assistant. He’d tried twice, with men just completing their medical training at St. Bartholomew’s, but they never stayed long. They learned what they could from him, and then left for London or Bath, where people could actually afford to pay for a doctor’s care.
The worst of it was that since his visit to Starberry Court the night before he couldn’t stop thinking—for the first time in his life—that perhaps he should go to London. But each time, the thought was met by scornful reality: proximity wouldn’t bring him any closer to Miss Laetitia Rainsford.
The distance between them was insurmountable. And the fact that he saw a look in her eyes that echoed the longing in his heart . . . that was irrelevant. A woman like her—astonishingly beautiful, intelligent, with luscious curves, the daughter of a lady (no matter how much of a harridan that lady might be)—wasn’t for him.
He was disheveled and exhausted, and he still faced a waiting room full of patients who would run the gamut from merely irritable to dangerously ill.
Sarah was nowhere to be seen when he stepped into the entry although, to his great surprise, he heard none of the usual crying or cursing coming from his waiting room. First he would see which patients were desperately in need of help. After that, he’d try to find something to eat, because he’d had nothing since four o’clock the previous afternoon.
He braced himself for whatever he might find on the other side of the waiting room door, pushed it open, and stopped short.
r /> She was there.
His patients were arrayed around the room, sipping tea as if they were at a party—well, all except that small boy with flushed cheeks, who definitely had a high fever. And she looked across at him with a smile that sent a bolt of lust all the way to his knees.
John wasn’t a man who lost control of his loins . . . and yet he was abruptly glad that his coat was cut unfashionably low. Miss Laetitia Rainsford was so damned beautiful.
Walking gracefully toward him, she counted off the patients on her fingers, described their conditions, and explained that there were no urgent cases. There was nothing he had to do this very moment, and therefore he should restore himself before attending to them. He glanced around and saw all the patients nodding at him. Miss Rainsford had bound up an arm and put a patch on an elderly man’s forehead.
He still hadn’t said a word, and an uncertain look crossed her face. “Cook has a hot meal waiting for you,” she said, sounding a bit hesitant.
Still, he didn’t speak.
He did the only thing he could, given the burst of feeling that spilled through his entire body. He caught her in his arms, and kissed her so hard that she bent over his arm.
But her arms wrapped around his neck, and she kissed him back.
He was dimly aware of cheering, but Dr. John Daniel Hatfield didn’t give a damn.
Chapter Twenty-six
Lady Rainsford descended from her bedchamber just in time for luncheon, which was enough to make India want to flee home to London. She hadn’t realized how profoundly disagreeable the woman was until she discovered that Lady Rainsford’s voice dominated whatever room she was in. Before the meal she talked on and on about the way society was degenerating into (if you listened to her) little better than a pack of wolves.
Fleming announced that Lala was confined to her chamber with a severe headache; all India could think was that if Lady Rainsford had been her mother, she would probably develop chronic migraines.
Luncheon was given over to a lecture on the medieval practices of royal ladies-in-waiting. All of which was meant to ensure that the entire party was made aware that Lady Rainsford had married beneath her.