Vixen

Chapter 16

If we went to London and you married a rich wife, then you could repay whatever of my fortune you had to use to make your house habitable." Chloe's tone was casually conversational. "You wouldn't have to repay what we spent on my come-out, of course. Clothes and balls and things like that…"

She twirled a silky chest hair around her little finger, her head resting in the crook of his shoulder. She'd never managed to get this far without being cut off before.

"There must be lots of rich women in London-widows or some such-who'd love to marry you. You're handsome and clever and-"

"Enough flattery." Hugo interrupted at last. "As it happens, I'm not in the least interested in rich widows, although I'm deeply complimented that you should imagine ranks of them falling at my feet."

"Oh, but you have to be sensible," she said earnestly. "It's possible that they won't be pretty… or even very young… but if they're rich-"

"What have I done to deserve being leg-shackled to an ancient widowed antidote, Chloe! You really have a low opinion of my charms, don't you?"

"No! I do not!" She sat up, her expression genuinely horrified that he should have thought such a thing. "I said you were handsome and clever and kind. But wouldn't a young, rich, pretty woman expect to many a title and a fortune? I thought that was what happened." She frowned down at him. "Did I hurt you?"

"No, you silly child, of course you didn't." Smiling, he reached up and twined his hands into the radiant cascade of hair falling around her face. "I am well aware of my handicaps on the marriage mart-elderly baronets in straitened circumstances are considered poor catches."

"You are not elderly!" Chloe laughed at this absurdity. Emboldened by the absence of the customary brusque interdiction on the subject, she went on. "But if you won't many a rich widow, then why can't we pay to put your house in order as part of the expenses of my come-out' I have to live somewhere while I find a suitable husband."

"Very well," Hugo said.

"What?" Chloe sat back on her ankles, blinking in disbelief. "Did you just say we could go to London?"

"That would be a correct interpretation," he agreed solemnly.

"But why… when… did you change your mind?"

"Why should that interest you?" he teased. "Isn't it enough that I said yes?"

"Yes… no… yes… but… but up to now you wouldn't even entertain the idea. I expected it to take weeks to soften you up!"

"Soften me up!" He pulled her down on top of him. "Of all the unscrupulous, sly little foxes!"

She was malleable satin, her body sweetly molding to the contours of his as he parted her thighs and entered her with a slow twist of his hips.

Her eyes widened as she absorbed the very different sensations of this novel position. "I didn't know you could do it this way."

"There are many ways, sweetheart." He stroked down her back.

"And we'll do them all," she declared with a smile so like a contented cat that he burst into laughter.

He'd never before made love with a partner so deli-ciously full of uninhibited joy. She was always eager, seizing on each new experience and sensation with hungry passion. And what he loved the most was the way she told him what she wanted even while she demanded he tell her what he wanted of her. She told him what she was thinking throughout, what pleased her both about what he did to her and what she did to him. It made lovemaking the most shared and sharing experience he could ever have imagined, and when he was with her in this way, the tarnished memories of the travesties in the crypt lost their bite.

"If I do this," she now said, moving her body over and around him, her teeth clipping her bottom lip, a frown of concentration drawing the fine eyebrows together, "does it feel nice for you?"

"Wonderful," he said, smiling at her through narrowed eyes, as entranced by her expression as he was by her movements.

"And this"-she leaned backward over her ankles, arching her body, and then gasped-"oh… perhaps I shouldn't do that just yet."

"Whatever and whenever you wish, lass," he said, holding her hips. "The conductor's baton is in your charge this afternoon."

"But it has to be right for you too," she said seriously. "You always make sure it's right for me."

He smiled again and reached for one perfect round breast; the small firm swell fit his cupped palm neatly. "Such a bundle of love you are, young Chloe."

Half an hour later, Chloe gathered her scattered attentions together again and returned to the subject uppermost in her thoughts. "How will we travel to London? It's a dreadfully long way."

'Two hundred miles," he agreed. "We'll hire a post-chaise."

"And change horses along the road," she said with a knowledgeable little nod. "Miss Anstey was to do that."

"That reminds me, we have to find you a duenna," he said, hitching himself up against the pillows. "You can't live in London alone in a bachelor household without scandalizing society."

"But you're my guardian."

"You still need a female chaperone… someone to accompany you to parties, to help you receive visitors, to shop with you."

"I had thought of asking Miss Anstey if she'd like to be a companion if I set up my own establishment," she said thoughtfully, a fingertip tracing the coiled serpent on his chest. "When you were being so horrid to me and I thought I couldn't bear to stay with you."

He caught her wrist, trying not to let her see how he hated her touching the mark of Eden. "Was I horrid enough to drive you to that, lass?"

"Yes, but not for long. Shall I write to Miss Anstey?"

"No, a governess won't do," he said. "You need a chaperone of some social standing."

"But who?"

"Leave it to me." He swung out of bed and stretched. "What a shameless way to spend an afternoon."

"It was a lovely way," Chloe disagreed. "And it's still pouring with rain. What else could one do?"

Hugo regarded her quizzically. "There are many useful things to be done on a rainy afternoon, lass."

She shrugged. "But none so pleasant, I'll lay odds."

"No, there you have me, I have to admit." He pulled on his shirt.

"So when shall we go?" Chloe made no effort to leave his bed, snuggling farther under the covers.

"As soon as I've talked to Childe at the bank, hired the chaise, arranged matters here. A week maybe."

"That soon!" Her indolent posture vanished. "But Beatrice won't have weaned the kittens by then."

"No!" Hugo said, stepping into his britches. "No and no and no." He came up to the bed. "I repeat, Chloe: no. I am resigned to Dante, but I will not journey to London with a cat, six kittens, a one-legged parrot, and a barn owl."

"Of course we won't take Plato," she said, as if the very idea were ridiculous. "He belongs here and his wing is almost healed."

"I'm relieved," he said dryly. "However, neither will we be taking the rest of the menagerie."

"I should think you'd be glad of Beatrice and her litter if your London house has as many mice as this one."

"No. No. No. Must I say it again?"

Chloe stared past him, apparently gazing with unwarranted interest at the rain-drenched windowpane.

Oeven days later, two fascinated postilions watched as one of their passengers busily ensconced a basket of mewling kittens and a bird cage inside the chaise. The occupant of the bird cage offered a ripe opinion on this change in his circumstances and then cackled with the appearance of self-satisfaction. A tortoisesheU cat leapt into the chaise after the kittens and curled on the squabbed seat by the window. A huge brindled mongrel ran, barking excitedly, around the chaise, his feathered tail flailing all and sundry.

Hugo stood supervising the securing of Petrarch to the rear of the chaise. He had no idea how it had happened. He couldn't even pinpoint the moment when he'd yielded. His ward had the most obdurate will, one that simply ignored opposition. She had behaved as if he couldn't possibly have meant his prohibition and somehow he'd come to believe that he hadn't.

But, dammit, he had! The prospect of a two-hundred-mile journey with that circus was hideous. No less so was the thought of arriving at his deserted and neglected house on Mount Street accompanied by a menagerie.

With a helpless frown he listened to Chloe's cheerful reassurances as she bestowed her family within the chaise. She seemed to be extolling the virtues of travel by post-chaise and all the excitements to come their way. Judging by Falstaffs response, they were not wholly impressed.

"Don't fancy travelin' with that lot," Samuel muttered, appearing at Hugo's side. "I've 'alf a mind to ride along wi' you."

Since Samuel was not much of a rider, rolling decks suiting him more than the rolling gait of a horse, the possibility was indicative of the depths of his feelings on the matter.

"I'm sorry," Hugo apologized, shaking his head. "I don't know how it happened."

"Won't take no for an answer, that's 'er trouble," Samuel pronounced.

"But what's mine?" Hugo demanded.

Samuel cast him a shrewd look. "Reckon ye know that as well as anyone." He stomped around to the open door of the chaise and peered doubtfully within. "Any room in there for me?"

"Yes, of course," Chloe said. "I'll sit with Beatrice and Falstaff and the kittens, and you can have the whole opposite seat to yourself."

"What about the dog?"

"He'll sit on the floor… but I expect some of the time he'll want to run along beside the carriage."

Samuel sighed heavily and clambered in. Chloe smiled warmly in welcome and scrunched herself up

against the squabs as if to make herself even smaller than she was.

"You do have enough room, don't you?" she asked with anxious solicitude as he settled down.

"Reckon so," he said with a grudging sniff. "But it'll smell to 'igh 'eaven in here, soon enough."

"It won't," Chloe insisted, trying to make Dante diminish as he leapt exuberantly into the carriage and bestowed his breathy grin on his fellow travelers. "They're very clean. And we can have the window open."

"Drafts is bad for me neck."

"Oh, Samuel, please don't mind." She reached over and placed a hand on his knee.

As always, he was not proof against the beguiling charm of her appeals. He grunted in half-acceptance. The whole expedition struck him as lunacy. He was Lancashire born and bred, and apart from his years at sea had never been out of the county. He had never been to London and had never wanted to go. He didn't want to now. It seemed to him they had enough to do at the manor, and now that Sir Hugo had come out of the doldrums, life could jog along quite smoothly. But where Sir Hugo went, he went too, and if Sir Hugo believed this crazily uncomfortable disruption of their lives was necessary, then Samuel would bite his tongue.

Hugo swung onto his horse, and the chaise moved out of the courtyard. He cast a glance behind him at his home. He had never been fond of it, not even as a boy, and had left it without regret when he'd joined the navy. Since his return, its proximity to Shipton and Gresham Hall had destroyed any desire to make a permanent home there. He'd stayed, attached by some fantastical umbilical cord to the one pure love of his life… and because it was as good a place as any other to drink himself into an early grave.

But all that was behind him.

Now he was caught up in a convolution to which he had to find a solution. And the only solution was a husband for Chloe. No suitable husband could be found if she remained at Denholm Manor. He couldn't establish her on her own without exposing her to Jasper's machinations. So it had to be London under his protection. Quod erat demonstrandum. The Latin tag from schoolboy geometry was somehow appropriate in its absolute truth.

And maybe in London they would find the distractions that would lessen the spell that diminutive bundle of love had cast over them both. Until the spell was broken, Chloe wouldn't be truly free to follow the conventional paths that Elizabeth would have wanted for her. She would find friends, activities, a social whirl that the sheltered girl could never have imagined. And as she became absorbed, so would the ties to himself lessen.

As for himself-once he had found London a hypnotic treasure chest. There were members of Society who would remember him… there were distant relatives who knew no worse of him than that he'd gone somewhat precipitately to fight Napoleon. He had friends at the Admiralty… men who existed on half pay rather than sell out at war's end. Once he'd been gregarious, there was no reason he shouldn't become so again. The shadow of the Congregation of Eden could be thrown off.

And in the pursuit of these distractions he would be able to withdraw gracefully from the unnatural… no, not unnatural, but utterly improper and disgraceful liaison with his seventeen-year-old ward.

And once she was respectably married, she'd be free of Jasper's threat, and he would be free to leave England and make some kind of a life for himself on the Continent.

He knew one thing, it was a knowledge that came from the marrow of his bones rather than his brain. He couldn't endure to live close to Chloe once she was married… in love… lost to him for all the right reasons. He'd ached in the wilderness for her mother. He wouldn't do it again for the daughter.