Chapter Three #2
“Greater men have been brought down by far less, I assure you. Furthermore, his virility is hardly the issue at stake.”
Charlotte appeared to fight a smile.
“I would appreciate it,” Emma continued, subduing her own smile as she swept down the stairs, “if you would alert the staff to be on guard against gossipmongers. I shall be more than occupied with the current crisis as it is.”
“I’ll say.” Charlotte trailed after her. “Shouldn’t one of us watch him through the night?”
“Heath and Julia have offered to take turns with me. This is an uncommon emergency one does not encounter in the etiquette books.”
Charlotte’s brow knitted in a frown. “You don’t think we shall have to close the school?”
“I haven’t thought past tomorrow. We can only hope that whatever scandal ensues will blow over without bringing us down with it.”
“We could always move to the country,” Charlotte said in hesitation. “I realize we are still short of funds, but—”
“And let Lady Clipstone think that she has driven us away?” Emma’s face darkened at the thought of admitting defeat to her rival in London, Lady Alice Clipstone, who had opened an academy in Hanover Square and who was unabashedly trying to steal Emma’s students.
She and Alice had been friends once and were now sworn enemies in etiquette.
Which meant that, as politely as possible, they never missed an opportunity to best the other.
“She won’t wait long to take advantage, I tell you. ”
Charlotte glanced away uncomfortably. “She hasn’t waited at all.”
“What are you saying?”
“Do you remember Lady Coralie?”
“The earl’s young niece?” Emma asked slowly.
The earl whom she had been courting forever for patronage.
His niece had been expected to enter the academy a week ago.
Two of the lady’s younger sisters were supposed to follow a few months later.
“Her baggage was due to arrive this week. I have a bed in readiness for her arrival.”
“Apparently, she is reconsidering,” Charlotte said. “She’ll inform us as soon as she decides.”
“How do you know this?” Emma demanded quietly.
“Our butler’s sister has gone to work for Lady Clipstone.”
“To work for my rival?” Emma allowed a note of mild indignation to deepen her voice. “Well, I never. She’ll be threatening to expose our secrets next.”
“You have no secrets, Emma,” Charlotte said with a consoling smile.
“I didn’t until today, but—oh, dear, I don’t suppose that Lord Wolverton’s presence can be kept secret.”
“He is a little large to hide away.”
Emma shook her head. “Still, we shall have to keep the girls removed from him and carry on as if nothing has changed. Thank goodness their wing is on the other side of the house.”
“We should be able to manage.”
“It’s only for two days,” Emma murmured. “Good heavens, if I can tame the lionesses I should be more than able to take care of one wounded gentleman.”
Adrian pretended to be asleep the three times Heath Boscastle crept into the bedchamber to check on him. He suspected that his light snores did not deceive Heath for a moment, but he had a splitting pain in his skull and was in no temper for conversation.
He was almost asleep when Heath’s wife Julia tiptoed in with an older maidservant to place a fresh poultice on his scalp.
And after that, with the warm herbal unguent dripping down his neck, he could not sleep at all.
Disgruntled, he flung off the covers, found flint and tinder to light a candle, and noticed the leather-bound lady’s journal on the chest of drawers opposite the bed.
“Well, well,” he muttered. “All I need is a lacy nightcap and pair of dentures and I could pass as my own grandmother.”
He opened the book, yawning, and settled back into bed to read.
He could have told the old saw-bones Scot that it would take an entire bottle of laudanum to knock out a man of Adrian’s size.
Not that he’d needed a sedative, anyway.
There was nothing wrong with his head but a deep bruise. He’d suffered worse.
He started to read. It was a handwritten journal penned in tidy, feminine script, the subject being—
He blinked. The words jumped about the page before he could see them properly. Ah.
Winter 1815
The gypsy fortune-teller at the ball tonight predicted I would meet my true love within the year. Of course, she wasn’t a genuine Romany. It was only Miranda Forester dressed in disguise again, and I doubt she could predict my next dance, let alone whom I shall love.
But I predict that it is dear Emma who shall be wed ere the year’s end—I have seen the way she dotes on Grayson’s baby and remember how once she dreamed of her own children—
The dressing room door that led to the bedchamber opened. By damn, if it was Heath acting mother hen again, and he caught Adrian reading a young girl’s love secrets, he would never hear the end of it. He leapt up from the bed, sending the rosette-embroidered coverlet flying in the air.
With only a moment to spare he vaulted over a footstool and wedged the journal between the other books piled upon the chest of drawers.
Then, schooling his face into an expression of startled innocence, he faced the figure who hesitated on the threshold behind him.
For an instant neither said a word. He merely savored the unfamiliar thrill that chased down his spine.
It was her. At last. He gazed into her eyes, waiting in anticipation. His little caretaker, in a high-buttoned blue-gray dressing gown, but with her hair cascading about her shoulders in an apricot gold cloud like a heavenly halo.
Or was it two haloes? he wondered. Suddenly it appeared that his angel of mercy had sprouted another head. Another face. Yet even though his vision was blurred, there was no mistaking the concerned frown on her fine-boned face.
Nor the warm familiarity of her voice, the cultured notes penetrating into the deepest recesses of his pounding skull. “Lord Wolverton, what folly is this?” she asked in exasperation. “What were you doing? You may not walk about in your condition.”
“I was”—he glanced guiltily at the journal that protruded from the stack of ill-heaped books where he’d stuck it—“searching for the chamberpot.”
“We certainly do not keep it upon the bureau.” She marched into the room, her finger pointing at the four-poster. “Get back into bed so that I may summon a footman to assist you in your private needs.”
Well, that was an embarrassment. “I can help myself,” he said, then swayed forward several feet, whereby he was forced to grab the bedpost to steady himself.
“You most assuredly cannot.” She hurried to his side, offering her shoulder for support. “You’re flapping about like a wounded butterfly.”
“A butterfly?” he asked, snorting.
“And with a candle lit,” she scolded him. “In your condition. Do you wish to set the house on fire?”
She guided him to the side of the bed, a humiliation he endured only because it gave him another chance to be closer to her.
He did, however, refuse to sit at her urging.
He was a fully grown man, not a bloody butterfly.
He had not personally answered to anyone in years.
He had no intention of allowing this bit of silk and satin, even if she was a Boscastle, to give him orders.
“I don’t want to get into bed again.”
“Get into that bed,” she said.
“I shall do so only when and if I please.”
Emma steeled her spine. She knew what he was about. Charming when he chose, belligerent when he didn’t get his own way. To think he would represent the aristocracy as a peer of the realm, for no matter what the circumstances of his return, he was by law a duke’s firstborn and would inherit.
“Physical and emotional strain will not heal your head wound,” she said briskly. “Get under those covers right now.”
He stood his ground, smiling at her in challenge. The woman thought to master him? “Did you hear what I just said?” he asked her.
“It is difficult not to when you are growling in my face,” she replied evenly.
He reclined suddenly on the bed. Not because this deceptively demure-looking gentlewoman so ordered him, but because he was overcome by an unexpected wave of dizziness.
“Growling?” He frowned darkly at her. “I’m barely talking above a whisper. If I really wanted to growl, I could bring down the walls.”
“I have no doubt of that.” She snapped the coverlet over his shoulders, apparently not intimidated by his assertion. “But what would you prove by such an ill-mannered display? You’d only end up making your head ache all the more. It’s not me you’ll punish but yourself.”
He wasn’t sure how it happened, but suddenly he found himself tucked back into bed, with Emma standing at his side, looking uncharitably satisfied and all the more irresistible for what she’d accomplished.
The most puzzling, if not humiliating, part of the situation was that he half enjoyed how she fussed over him.
It wasn’t the usual attention he drew from a woman, but it pleased him, nonetheless.
Naturally, it also led his mind to consider what other pleasures she might offer to console him.
“Why do you and your brother insist on waking me up every hour?” he asked, studying her closely.
“The physician instructed us to keep watch over you.”
“Why?” he asked in a surly voice, curious to see whether he could unnerve her. The few ladies he’d encountered in London who weren’t afraid to associate with him seemed intrigued by his past, not to mention his inheritance.
Emma was a more difficult one to decipher. “We’re checking you for confusion,” she replied. “Changes in temperament and so on.”
He grunted. “Really. And how the devil would you know, may I ask?”
She plumped the pillows up behind his shoulders. He’d be spoon-fed next and taken out in a chair to the garden. “How would I know what?”