Chapter 1 #2
It was dark within. Joan knew her brother had proper servants, but they must have learned by now not to admit visitors, light, or fresh air before three in the afternoon.
She peeled off her gloves and raised one eyebrow at the man still holding the door open, now staring at her in amazement. “How do you do, Lord Burke?”
Slowly he closed the door. “Very well, Miss . . .”
She closed her eyes for a moment. Was she that forgettable? Or was he that dense? “Joan Bennet. I’m Douglas’s sister. We’ve met a dozen times at least.” Well, perhaps more like half a dozen, and none at all in the last couple of years, but he didn’t look in any state to contradict her.
“Have we?” He folded his arms, and managed to look rather austere and forbidding, despite his state of undress, unshaven face, and the wild tangle of his hair. He still wore it long, she noticed, right down to his shoulders . . . which were far broader and more muscular than she had remembered.
“You always seem to be unclothed when we meet,” she blurted out, then smiled sweetly as his jaw dropped. “But perhaps you don’t remember that time you burst into my bedroom?”
His eyes narrowed, and color washed up his face, visible even in the gloomy hall. “Now I remember you,” he said in a low voice. “The impertinent girl.”
She beamed. “Yes, that’s the one. Shall I show myself up? I assume Douglas is still abed.” She turned toward the stairs and started up.
“Where are you going? Bloody—dash it all, you can’t burst into a man’s bedchamber at this hour!” He bounded after her.
Joan stopped and turned to face him. Three stairs down, he was shorter than she was, so she had the pleasure of looking down at him and his naked chest. “But that’s what you did to me. In the middle of the night, no less.”
Deeper color roared across his high cheekbones. “We were children.”
She pointedly looked down. “Obviously not anymore.” To her immense delight, he actually crossed his arms as if to cover himself.
Joan bit her cheek to keep from bursting into snickers.
“But my mother sent me to see Douglas, and the longer I argue with you about it, the less time I shall have for myself after doing my duty. Don’t worry,” she said as he opened his mouth to argue.
“I know where his room is.” And she turned her back on him and hurried up the rest of the stairs, listening to his footsteps thunder up behind her a moment later.
Douglas was, as expected, sleeping off a drinking binge.
Joan studied the lump under the blankets for a moment.
Once she decided it could only be one person, she went to the windows and threw open the drapes.
The blankets didn’t stir. She opened a window, letting in a gust of spring breeze and the rattle of carriages and carts in the street below.
The blankets were still. Perhaps it was all blankets and even Douglas wasn’t there.
That would be grossly irritating, since she would either have to find her brother or go home and tell her mother he hadn’t been in.
There was one way to know for sure. She grabbed the end of the covers nearest her, and yanked.
Douglas raised his head and blinked at her, his eyes bloodshot and unfocused. “Bloody hell,” he said in a muffled voice. “Who the devil are you?”
“Your sister,” she said briskly, tossing the blanket back over most of him. A fleeting glimpse of her brother’s bare arse was more than enough. “Mother sent me.”
Douglas pulled the blanket over his head, and said something that sounded very vulgar. Joan filed it away for future reference—in private, of course. Her fascination with bad language would land her in so much trouble if her mother ever discovered it.
“She wants you to come to the Malcolm ball tomorrow evening.” She made a great clatter shoving things off the only chair in the room and dragging it to the side of the bed. “Shall I ring for tea?”
“Go away,” he said beneath the blanket.
“I’m very sorry, I can’t do that until you promise to attend the Malcolm ball. Do you promise?”
“No,” her brother moaned.
Joan reached for the bell cord and pulled it, hard.
“I braved your half-naked friend downstairs. What is he doing here, by the way? He really should let the footman answer the door; it was quite alarming to come face-to-face with his bare chest. Also, he shouted at me when he opened the door. Douglas, are you listening?”
“No,” he moaned again.
“Good,” she told him. “I have plenty more to complain about, and might as well do it to you.”
Douglas flipped the blanket away from his face. “What will it take?” he asked desperately, “to make you go away?”
“Your promise, in writing, to attend the Malcolm ball.”
“In writing?”
“So I can prove to Mother that I did, in fact, secure your promise, and that it is not my fault when you don’t show up anyway, despite having given said promise.”
Her brother stared at her for a moment, finally focusing his gaze. “I despise you, Joan,” he said at last. “I really do.”
She seized the blanket when he tried to pull it back over his head. “It’s not my idea that you go to the Malcolm ball. Even Papa doesn’t care. But Mother has it set in her mind that you would make a handsome couple with Felicity Drummond, and she’ll be at the ball tomorrow night.”
“Felicity Drummond?” Douglas’s face was comically blank. “Who?”
“I suppose you could ignore Mother’s summons and stay away, but then you run the risk of finding yourself betrothed to Felicity without having ever met her. She’s sweet enough,” Joan added conscientiously, leaving out any mention of Felicity’s snide sister and grasping mother.
At that moment a servant stumbled into the room, breathing hard and looking as if he’d just fallen out of bed. “Yes, sir, what can I do for you?” he asked in a rush, then stopped and looked at Joan in bewilderment. “And miss,” he added uncertainly.
“Tea, please,” she said.
“Throw this woman out, Murdoch,” croaked Douglas. “She’s assaulted me in my bed!”
Joan ignored him. “Very strong tea,” she said to the servant, whose gaze was swinging between her and the lump in the bed that was her brother. “With muffins, if you have any.” The servant hesitated, then fell back on his training and bowed to her.
“And brandy!” Douglas called after his departing servant. “Don’t forget the bloody brandy!”
“Douglas, you’re a sot.”
“You’re a nag!” he returned indignantly, shoving himself up on one arm to glare at her. “I never woke you at the break of dawn and started yammering on about balls and betrothals and Mother! God, I’m going to have a beastly headache all day now, thanks to you.”
Joan went to the small writing desk, tossed a crumple of discarded cravats off it, and got out a piece of paper. She uncapped the ink and wrote a brief line, promising to attend the Malcolm ball, then carried it and the pen over to the bed. “Sign this and I shall leave.”
Douglas eyed it as if it were a poisonous snake. “You can’t mean it!”
She sighed. “Then I must stay. Perhaps you can help me decide which color my new dress should be. Blue, do you think? But I’ve got a number of blue ones.
Mother thinks pink is my color, but I really don’t like it.
Yellow is even worse”—Douglas wrenched the blanket back over his head—”and that leaves green.
But I look like a shrub in green. I suppose there’s also orange . . . What do you think?”
“Gold,” said a familiar voice from the doorway. “You should wear gold.”
This time Joan was prepared, having expected him to return eventually. So much the better that he’d got right to it; having a quarrel with his friend could only make Douglas even more anxious to appease her. She turned in her chair, a delighted smile on her face, and then stopped cold.
Tristan Burke was quite a sight when surly, half-asleep, and barely dressed.
But with his hair slicked back and a deep green dressing gown wrapped around him, he was the essence of seduction.
And he was watching her with his heavy-lidded, intent gaze as if she were as fascinating to him as he was to her.