Page 7 of Barbarous

Ramsay frowned at the monkey before commencing to fumble with the chain and quizzing glass. Humans and monkey observed with interest as Ramsay’s huge fingers struggled with the delicate chain and clasp.

Daphne watched as long as she could bear it before stepping forward and taking both items from his unresisting hands and squinting down at them. The chain wasn’t broken but the clasp was bent. Fortunately the metal was soft and she was able to gently tug it straight, until the tiny hinge opened and closed smoothly. Once she was satisfied with her work, she slid the glass onto the chain, closed the clasp, and gestured for Ramsay to lean forward.

Only when his golden head was inches from her face did Daphne realize how brash her actions had been. But it was too late to retract the offer so she lifted the chain over his bowed head, needing to stand on her toes to accomplish the task. The deed took only seconds, but it brought her close enough to catch a whiff of his scent: an intoxicating blend of sun-warmed skin, fine wool, and something sharp and tangy she could not identify. Her first impulse was to bury her nose in his crisp, shiny locks and inhale until she could place the scent that eluded her.

Thankfully she did not yield to that impulse.

Instead, she dropped the chain and stepped back, her heart pounding frantically at her brief brush with sensual madness.

She cleared her throat and avoided his disconcerting green eye. “I will go find my housekeeper, Mrs. Turner. She will arrange accommodations for both you and your servants and determine the most convenient place for you to store your possessions.”

Daphne turned without waiting for his answer—or, God forbid—his questions.

* * *

Hugh studied the departing figure of his young aunt, enjoying the slight sway of her hips beneath the heavy train of her habit. He was, quite frankly, stunned by his uncle’s widow. Oh, he’d known the old man had married a girl more than fifty years his junior—but he hadn’t expected this. Hugh had possessed only vague recollections of the little neighbor girl he’d left behind seventeen years ago. But this woman? This tall, lithe, cool, perfectly sculpted, self-contained creature? Hugh shook his head; both at her and at his immediate, and unfortunate, reaction to her. She was bloody gorgeous.

He watched until she disappeared up the steps of Lessing Hall and then he reconstructed her in his mind’s eye, but without any clothing—a specialty of his. He smiled at the mental picture, which was more than a little gratifying. But even more enticing than her beautiful face and slim body had been the haughty, appraising intelligence he’d seen in her frosty blue eyes. Hugh knew it was juvenile, but he’d always had a weakness for women who appeared immune to his charm; charm that, he’d been told more often than was good for him, was not inconsiderable.

And then there was the way she’d looked up at him when he rode into that clearing. Hugh grinned. Even crawling about on her hands and knees with her hair half down, she’d been in possession of her wits—or at least she’d managed to look like she was.

Beautiful, smart, aloof, and doughty! Could there be a more intriguing combination?

Hugh pushed back his hat and scratched the scar at his temple, his smile fading as he thought back to that clearing. Just what the devil had that been about? He certainly did not believe Malcolm Hastings’s ridiculous story. What had the two of them been up to? Hugh would have given a great deal to have come upon the fracas even a minute earlier. Not that she hadn’t handled the matter herself, if Hastings’s bloody nose was anything to go by.

Good Lord, she had looked fierce! The furious light in her eyes when she’d shifted her angry blue glare from Hastings to Hugh had gone straight to his groin.

Hugh paused to consider his body’s reaction. Just what was it about self-possessed, haughty, furious women he found so arousing? He shrugged and chalked it up to his fascination with danger in general; and dangerous women in particular.

She is the mother of your dead uncle’s children. The rogue thought thrust itself among the more lusty ones crowding his head, but Hugh brushed it aside. So what if she’d been married to Thomas? It wasn’t as if he was lusting after either of his real blood-aunts. That thought—meant to be reassuring, instead conjured up visions of his batty Aunt Amelia and terrifyingly militant Aunt Letitia. Hugh shivered.

She was Thomas’s lover. This thought was harder to ignore and clanged loudly as it slammed down, caging his libidinous fantasies like an iron-toothed portcullis.

“Blast and damn,” Hugh muttered. Since when had his conscience developed into such a loud, nosy, and insistent presence—especially when it came to his amores?

She bore Thomas’s children.

The unsettling image of his uncle and young wife—as invasive as the proverbial serpent in the original garden—slithered into his brain and swallowed up his randy imaginings entirely. The enticing naked image he’d constructed with such care disappeared as quickly as a seaman’s self-control in a whorehouse. Hugh recoiled from the unwelcome image that replaced it: that of his ancient uncle bedding the spirited, nubile creature who had just left him.

Hugh closed his eyes against the horrifying image, but the damage had already been done; never had his ardor been so thoroughly extinguished.

But that wasn’t enough for the pitiless voice in his head. You have come back to pay your debt—not create a new one. You must do your duty and return to your real business.

Ah yes, his real business. Well, he was here now, so there was no point in thinking about the places he wasn’t, or about the things he wasn’t doing.

Hugh shoved away the hectoring inner voice and turned his attention to the motley band of sailors overrunning Lessing Hall’s manicured lawn.

Part of him thoroughly enjoyed the spectacle—especially when he considered how the sight would have outraged the old earl. His stiff, proper uncle had been a starched-up man who had feared a vulgar display more than a public shaming in a stockade.

But another part of Hugh—the small part that was forever English, no matter how much he would never belong here—wanted to protect this delicate place from the turbulence of the outside world. From men like him.

The verdant park, the elegant sprawl of bricks that comprised Lessing Hall, the somnolent air which hung over it all—it was a cool oasis of tranquility and calm. Standing in this peaceful slice of green, a person could forget that a short distance away men like Napoléon Bonaparte were tearing apart the world with violence and greed.

That was Hugh’s world; not this one.

He had just turned twenty when his uncle banished him from Lessing Hall in shame seventeen years ago. Seventeen years; a lifetime.

He now had more in common with the human flotsam and jetsam he’d deposited on this pristine lawn than he’d ever had with his uncle or anyone else in England. Hugh’s memories of the late earl were pale recollections, but he knew his uncle would have been scandalized by the man Hugh had become—a man hardly more civilized than the Barbary corsairs who had captured, enslaved, and brutalized him all those years ago.