attempted to extricate himself from Lady Chawton’s arms. She’d had one or three too many glasses of champagne tonight, and her embrace was all gloves and no dignity.
“I,” she said in a breathy voice, “am going to do the most wicked things to your body. All. Night. Long.”
“All night?”
“Yes.”
Chase sighed. He didn’t have “all night” in him. His plan had been “some of the night.”
And as of this moment, he was leaning toward “none of the night.”
This wasn’t turning out the way he’d hoped. Winifred was beautiful, no question. Witty, too. They’d been flirting for years at balls and parties, bringing their sensual tension to a slow simmer. Yet he’d always held off on making an advance. On reflection, he supposed—and God, it was a worrisome thing to admit—he’d been saving her for a special occasion.
Or, in this case, an emergency. He had never been in such desperate need of a good, hard bout of bedsport.
Now he teetered on the brink of calling it off. He just wasn’t in the mood, for some reason.
No. For one reason.
A small reason, really. One with black hair and eyes that swallowed up rooms. A reason possessing the most tender touch he’d ever known and a voice that curled softly in the air, like smoke.
“Reynaud?”
He snapped to attention.
Winifred pouted. “Do let’s go inside.” She snuggled closer and gave a dramatic shiver. “It’s cold.”
The night was unseasonably warm, even for July.
“Perhaps you’re taking a chill, darling.” He motioned for the groom to remain, rather than leading the team back to the mews. “If you’re ill, I’d better see you home. We can do this another night.”
“Don’t be a bore.” She looped her arms around his neck and swayed like a pendulum in his arms. A pendulum on opiates. “You’ve kept me waiting a long time for this. Far too long.”
“Then what are a few days more? The waiting will make it all the sweeter.” He tried to peel her gloved fingers from the back of his neck, but just when he’d worked one hand free, the other clamped down. He began to wonder if her purple gloves were adorned with octopus suckers.
“What a cruel tease you are.” She leaned forward, falling against his chest, and whispered vampishly in his ear. “Be careful, or I’ll tease you back.” With a satin-gloved finger, she traced the whorls of his ear. A pleasant enough sensation, but it didn’t precisely send lust bolting to his groin. Then she slipped her finger in his ear. All the way to the knuckle. Probing and wiggling.
She murmured, “Do you like that, you naughty boy?”
Actually, no. No, he didn’t.
He batted her hand away, and her finger dislodged from his ear canal with a popping sound.
That was enough. The evening was over.
First, Winifred was drunk.
Second, her sexual overtures were decidedly strange. Chase didn’t mind strange. In other times and other places, he’d enjoyed far stranger. But not tonight.
Third, and most importantly, he couldn’t get Miss Mountbatten out of his mind. Oh, he could coax himself to try panting and sweating her out of his bloodstream. But that wasn’t his style. Chase liked to think he possessed too much respect for women to make love to one while thinking of another. He had too much pride, as well. Halfhearted encounters would tarnish his reputation—one he’d polished to a glossy sheen with hands and lips and tongue.
He put his hands on her shoulders and pushed, applying just enough force to put distance between them. “Listen, Winifred—”
She shushed him by putting a finger to his lips. The same finger that had mere moments ago been knuckle-deep in his ear. “Not another word until we’re inside, naked, and I have my mouth on your—”
Chase would never learn precisely where Winifred meant to place her mouth. Before the lady could finish her thought, she gave a shriek piercing enough to cut glass, and he found himself sputtering with shock.
Cold. That was the first decipherable sensation.
And after cold, wet.
A deluge of water had sloshed over them both. He slicked his hair back with both hands and looked up. He spied Rosamund and Daisy hanging over the window sash far above. Each girl held an empty bucket in her hands.
“Ever so sorry!” Rosamund called down. “We needed to bail out the bilgewater.”
“Too many rats,” Daisy added, hand cupped around her mouth. “There’s plague aboard.”
“Oh, those little . . .” Chase completed the thought with a growl. They had better run and hide, or he would show them the meaning of plague.
Winifred hadn’t ceased shrieking. Her once-artfully arranged golden ringlets were now plastered to her face, obscuring her eyes. She swiped at them with gloved fingers, all the while vibrating with shock.
Chase saw his narrow window of advantage, and he took it. He shook his arms free of his topcoat and draped it over her shoulders, turning her to face the phaeton. To the groom, he said, “Lady Chawton will return home at once.”
What with the added weight of water, and her unwillingness or inability to assist, it took Chase and the groom several failed attempts and a final one-two-three-heave! to boost poor Winifred into the phaeton. Chase fought back clouds of purple satin and netting, stuffing them into the coach and slamming the door.
The groom took the driver’s seat, and Chase gave the lady’s address. “Lovely spending time with you,” he called out, raising a hand in farewell.
Then he turned on his heel and jerked open the door.
Four flights of stairs. Chase stomped on each riser with deliberate, ominous slowness, giving those hellions time to hear him coming and quake with mounting dread. “Rosamund and Daisy Fairfax!” he bellowed. “Pack your things for Malta!”
However, he never made it as far as the nursery. Just as he reached the third-floor landing, he found his march of doom intercepted.
By Miss Alexandra Mountbatten.
He looked like a wet cat, Alex thought. A wet, angry, ferocious, wild, and very, very large cat. Such as a tiger or a lion or a jaguar or—
“Miss Mountbatten,” he snarled. “Kindly step aside.”
“Wait.” She stretched her arms from the banister to the wall, obstructing his progress. “It wasn’t their fault.”
