Chapter Six #2
“Tell me you did not kidnap me without a change of clothing.” It was an order, no question in sight. “You haul along a trunk no doubt full of bits and bobs and baubles, and I’m to endure this endeavor in a singular pair of small clothes?”
Harriet willed herself not to blush at the mention of undergarments. Blushing every time the man spoke of something indecorous was as inconvenient as it was embarrassing.
“That is your trunk, my lord,” she bit out. Alexander raised an eyebrow at her.
“I didn’t exactly have access to your full wardrobe and accouterments, did I?
Your, er … Miss Hightower … was kind enough to have her footman pack some clothing that you keep at her house, presumably for …
reasons.” Why had she even begun to speculate about the conditions under which a gentleman might require spare clothes at his mistress’s house?
He bent and rifled through the trunk with a frown.
“She said those were your clothes—is something wrong? If so, I’m deeply sorry.”
“Your manners are a credit to kidnappers everywhere,” Alexander retorted.
“They are my clothes, yes, but they’re business clothes.
Hardly fit for travel.” He grabbed them anyway.
Privately, Harriet thought he was being quite the petulant child.
His sour mood went a long way to assuage her lust for him.
“I had to make do. Surely you can purchase something more suitable in Gretna Green.”
“Ah, the first mention of our mysterious destination!”
“Come now, where did you think we were going to elope, my lord?”
“Will you cease with the ‘my lord’? It makes me itch. I give you leave to use my Christian name.”
“No, thank you.” Harriet liked the distance the title provided. Best to remember exactly whom she was dealing with at all times. “My lord,” she added a moment later, just to watch the muscles of his jaw clench.
Just then, the door opened, and a servant girl entered with a bottle of gin and two glasses. She looked up at Alexander adoringly. He’s not so special as all that, Harriet wanted to tell her.
“We didn’t have any brandy, sir, only gin. I’ll return with your meal soon.” She curtsied then, her eyes lingering on him. Harriet rolled her own eyes; no wonder the man was so insufferable.
“Thank you kindly …”
“Miss Evans.”
“Thank you kindly, Miss Evans. Gin will do just fine.” He set the bottle and glasses down on the small table beside Harriet, then fished a coin from his pocket and pressed it into Miss Evans’s hand.
As if buoyed by the female attention, his mood changed entirely.
Harriet could feel the air shift; she wanted to hurl her book at his head.
He plucked a shirt out of his trunk and tossed it onto the bed.
“Right then,” Alexander began, as he started to undo his shirt buttons, “where are your things? Shall we call back Miss Evans to assist you with that delightful dress? Or would you rather your husband do it for you? Quite scandalous. I approve, of course.” He winked, which Harriet supposed was meant to do something to a lady.
As it stood, she was too vexed by him to feel anything.
“I told the innkeeper we were husband and wife to avoid scandal,” she rejoined. “I’m not one of your many lovesick admirers; I won’t have you painting me as a wanton fool who loses her senses at the sight of your hands.”
“It’s my hands for you, then? I get eyes more often. Shoulders even. One woman went mad for my calves, but she was French.”
The man was at least half devil. The best thing to do with misbehaving little boys was to ignore them.
“Personally, I think my best feature is my—”
“I don’t have other clothes,” she cut him off. “This is the only dress I have.”
“And what a lovely carriage dress it is.” Alexander’s mouth tilted into an appreciative smile, which heated Harriet’s cheeks again. Calling what she was wearing a carriage dress was like calling a handkerchief a picnic blanket. “My abduction just became a fair bit more endurable.”
He kept his smile—his practiced smile, Harriet reminded herself—pasted on his face as he finished unbuttoning his shirt, pulling it over his head. Unfortunately, as soon as he stopped talking, the attraction returned.
Those ladies were right. His deep brown eyes, yes.
His broad shoulders, absolutely. His calves were hidden by the bed between them at the moment, but likely those too.
It was only a surprise they didn’t mention his thick, dark hair, his distinguished nose, his surprisingly perfect teeth, the lines near his eyes from all his flirtatious smiles, the way his …
His shirt was off. Gone. It might be floating in the Nile for all she knew.
Harriet had gotten used to breathing while looking at his exposed neck, but when Lord Alexander removed his shirt to reveal the entirety of his bare chest, that did her poor respiratory system in.
She inhaled sharply, promptly choked on the air she’d inhaled, and spun around quickly to have a coughing fit facing the wall, which seemed approximately one percent less embarrassing than continuing to face him.
Behind her, Alexander laughed warmly, clearly enjoying himself. “Normally, I’d ask if you were all right, but it really wouldn’t do to save my captor.”
Harriet ignored this and tried to get her mortifying cough under control.
“I must say,” he continued, relishing every excruciating second of her ordeal, “I don’t believe I’ve ever had that precise reaction from a lady upon seeing my chest.”
In the future, Harriet decided, it would be best to remain in circumstances in which she didn’t have to hear him name any body parts.
She cleared her throat, trying to behave as if everything was under control.
She turned a quarter of the way back to him, unwilling to be confronted with the whole of him again.
“Apologies, my lord.” She tried to keep some bite in the honorific, some hint of the sting his title was supposed to deliver. But even to her own ears, it sounded meek and missish. “It was my first.”
“Your first?” She could tell—even from across the room, with her eyes trained on a small knot in the beam of the wall—that he was once again smirking.
“My first … chest.” Harriet winced at the word. She had never disliked a word before, ever. Every word had a point, a purpose. As it turned out, the word chest was designed to humiliate her as deeply as possible.
“I can only pray it lived up to your expectations.”
She turned to him fully then, finding his lips quirked in precisely the manner she’d predicted.
Until now, she would not have thought she had expectations about men’s chests. But apparently, she did, for Alexander’s soared high above anything she’d ever imagined.
“What else have you yet to see, I wonder,” Alexander mused, reaching down to undo the buttons of his fall.
The question snapped her out of her reverie. She spun abruptly back toward the wall. The wall, with its fascinating wooden beams and uneven plaster.
“Oh, come now, you might enjoy the next part even more than my chest.”
“I’m sorry I stared.”
“I’m not,” Alexander said simply. There wasn’t an ounce of flirtation in his voice, which turned out to be much more affecting than anything else he’d said. The rest of his teasing she could dismiss, but this? A woman could almost believe he was telling the truth.
He truly seemed unbothered by her having seen him disrobe.
Harriet couldn’t imagine how she’d feel if he saw her in her chemise.
Then suddenly she was imagining it, and her face heated another degree.
This had to be the warmest inn in the entire country, and there wasn’t even a fire in the bloody room.
From behind her, she heard Alexander’s footsteps getting closer, felt her entire body clench in anticipation of … anticipation of … something. Was he going to touch her? Her back tingled. Her insides clenched. She felt his breath against her ear.
“Are you still blushing?”
“No!” she snapped, whirling back to face him, conscious this time to keep her eyes no farther south than his hairline.
“If we were to marry, you’d see a lot more than that.”
“If ? ” She knew she sounded shrill, but she found it difficult to keep the panic out of her voice.
The ton wasn’t very forgiving if a lady was found embracing a man in a library; but being found alone in a coaching inn, again with the same man?
Was there a word beyond ruination? Annihilation, perhaps?
“There is nothing you can offer me that I want, I’m afraid.” Lord Alexander paused and then grinned at her, sliding one arm into the clean shirt. “At least, nothing that requires matrimony,” he teased.
“You don’t bed innocents, my lord.”
“Oh, but you’ve been recently ruined. Regardless, one must always enforce one’s own rules rather liberally. There’s nothing so dull as a man with good discipline.”
“Why, my lord, you must be the most diverting man in England, then!”
“You have no idea.” He shot Harriet a smoldering look, one that might entice a woman to do just about any foolish thing he suggested. A look he’d probably spent years of his life perfecting.
Thankfully, Harriet had learned well to ignore the caprices of a man. Although Alexander’s dark, fiery eyes were much more tempting to give in to than the rheumy, drunk eyes of her father.
“My sister will never sell you her land if you don’t marry me.”