Worth; Lord Of Reckoning Read online

* * *

  Could she make it as far as her quarters unaided before Captain Imperious of the Surrey Mounted Flotilla returned?

  Likely not—not yet.

  This Kettering-at-your-service must be some arrogant younger relation of Jacaranda’s employer, an opportunistic nephew thinking to sponge off the old gentleman for the summer’s visit, or an heir eyeing his expectations. She’d set him to rights when her head stopped throbbing and the room stopped expanding and contracting every time she moved.

  The fellow wasn’t entirely without use, though. He came back into the kitchen bearing a bowl of chipped ice, an incongruously cheerful red-checkered towel over his shoulder.

  “Plenty enough ice left for our purposes,” he said. “I’ll have to speak to Simmons about ordering more.”

  Jacaranda had printed a reminder for Simmons regarding the ice not two days past.

  “Hold still, madam.”

  That was all the warning Mr. Kettering gave Jacaranda before he held a towel full of ice firmly to the side of her head. The resulting pain caused her meager shortbread dinner to rebel and had her ears roaring again. When the roaring subsided, she was aware of the discomfort traveling even into her shoulder and of how the ice against her wound made her head both freeze and burn at the same time.

  “Woman, you will hold still. You’re in no condition to be delivering set-downs or lectures or whatever it is you’re planning to deliver. Soon, your head won’t hurt so badly, I promise.”

  His voice was brusque as he held the towel against her throbbing skull with one hand. With the other, he cradled her jaw, imprisoning her cheek against a washboard-firm stomach. His shirt was damp, of course, but through the dampness the heat of him warmed her jaw. Jacaranda should have shot to her feet with the indignity of it.

  Should have scolded him smartly for his presumptuousness.

  Should have delivered a set-down wrapped in a lecture tied up with a sermon.

  She leaned closer to his warmth.

  “Better, hmm?” He took the towel away. “Bleeding has stopped, too, thank the Everlasting Powers. Hold this here.” He took her hand in his and anchored the towel to her temple again. “I’ll fix us a spot of tea. You’re pale as a felon awaiting sentence.”

  He moved off—a relief, that. Jacaranda held the melting ice for as long as she could, but the cold penetrated her hand as effectively as it had her head, and her teeth threatened to chatter. She distracted herself from the chill by watching Kettering bustle around the kitchen. For a big, rather wet man, he moved silently. He was in stocking feet—he must have left his footwear in the back hall for the Boots—breeches, waistcoat and shirt, and his clothing left nothing to the imagination.

  This exponent of the Kettering male line wasn’t a retiring, scrawny functionary holed up at the Inns of Court with a flannel around his dear, wattled neck. This fellow looked like he split wood, shod horses, and loaded sea-going vessels in his spare time.

  His height was the first thing Jacaranda had noticed. Added to his height was his darkness: dark hair—particularly when wet, of course—and a burnished cast to his neck and forearms that suggested he frequently went without his hat—and shirt.

  Beyond his appearance, he bore an energy that would have had Jacaranda scooting out of his path, if dignity would allow such a thing. Coupled with that energy was a brisk competence, which, at the moment, she appreciated.

  “Drink.” He put a cup of tea before her, as if she were a recalcitrant denizen of the nursery.

  Jacaranda did not touch the tea cup.

  “Oh, now.” He set the tea tray down and lowered his presuming self right beside her. “Settle your hackles, duchess. What self-respecting Englishwoman refuses a nice hot cup of tea?” He wrapped her hands around the cup, his own cradling hers on either side of the mug. “See? Feels good. Now, don’t be contrary when you know you’ll enjoy your tea.”

  He took his hands away, having made his point, and Jacaranda’s inchoate chill was abruptly supplanted by a peculiar heat rising from her middle.

  “You’re blushing,” Mr. Kettering informed her. “I’m charmed, but you’re still not drinking your tea, and until you have a sip, I can’t touch mine.”

  She drank her tea, a cautious taste at first, but he was right: The tea was hot, strong and sweet, and the first cup of tea she’d ever had prepared by a man. The taste was disconcertingly good.

  “Better, right?” He set his empty cup on the table. “I should have a housekeeper around here, and she might have something dry you could borrow to wear. It’s dark out, thank the Deity. No one need see you in a servant’s attire if we wrap you in a dark cloak and take you home in a closed carriage.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Servant’s attire?

  “I’m rather fond of the old dear,” he went on, “and one doesn’t want to give offense to loyal retainers. Mrs. Wyeth is the closest thing to a decent female on the premises, unless you want me canvassing the neighbors for some clothes?”

  “I will wear my own clothes, thank you very much.” She pushed her half-finished tea away and made to rise, but he’d boxed her in on the bench, and as soon as she gained her feet, her head sounded a trumpet fanfare of pain that blared past her neck, into her chest and arm.

  “Perishing damned females, excuse the language,” he muttered while he gently tugged her back down beside him. “I don’t suppose you’re married, and that’s what all this misguided dignity is about? You will tell me now if some anxious husband must be dealt with. I insist on honesty from the women I rescue, and have no patience for mornings wasted on the field of so-called honor.”

  She sank onto the bench, mortified to feel another flush—it was not a blush—accompanying the pounding in her skull. How busy her bodily responses were after such an insignificant bump on the head.

  “Naughty girl,” he chided, his arm around her waist. He used his free hand to sweep her wet hair back over her shoulder, the better to mortify her by studying her wound.

  “Now listen to me, duchess, because I am not at all accustomed to explaining myself.” He drew his hand over her hair again, as if to move it, except the entire damp, curling mass of her sopping braid was already lying back over her shoulder. Then he did it again. And again.

  “A newly discovered younger relation will join me here tomorrow—a schoolgirl, but at that dangerous, almost-hatched age, you know? Then, too, my niece will be coming along, and she’s a frightfully noticing little thing, much as my late sister was. I can’t offend my housekeeper’s sensibilities when I’ve all but ignored my own property for five years. We must see you returned to your proper residence, even if you’re a bit bedraggled and the worse for wear.”

  Still that slow, beguiling caress continued over Jacaranda’s damp hair as Mr. Kettering went on. “A man has the right to ignore his possessions and estates, provided he’s not negligent, but housekeepers are women, and they take on about such things. They get attached to their routines, and I’ve every intention of ignoring the place for another five years once I get these infernal girls sorted out. So we’ll not be upsetting my dear Mrs. Wyeth, hmm?”

  Jacaranda lifted her head from his shoulder, having no idea how she’d assumed such a misbegotten posture.

  “You are without doubt the most conceited, managing excuse for a grown man it has ever been my misfortune to share a pond with.”

  His hand disappeared. “Be that as it may, you will not upset my housekeeper with airs and ingratitude, regardless of your mood, station, or dented noggin.”

  “There’s no need for me to upset her,” Jacaranda shot back. “You’ve already done a thorough job of it.”

  * * *

  Worth’s midnight mermaid was addling his tired wits.

  She was pretty, which was likely the source of the problem. He had a weakness for pretty women, though he’d learned long ago that they had no weakness for him. The pretty ones fretted at the most inopportune times about whether their hair was mussed, and he, of course, liked to mus
s a lady’s hair. Then, too, pretty women were always looking past one’s shoulder to see who was watching and to whose more interesting, titled, or wealthy side they might flit.

  Still, they were pretty, and beauty in a female could mesmerize him, despite common sense and humiliating experience in his youth to the contrary.

  The lady in his kitchen bore a touch of the exotic, all of her features and colors one detail away from perfection. Her eyes were not the fashionable blue. They were gentian, almost lavender, and so luminous as to look as though they belonged to a temple cat in human form. Her hair was not quite black, but on the curling ends looked sable, and it fell down her back in a cascade of curls and twists and flyaway strands that begged a man to write sonnets and conjure naughty fantasies.

  Her hair looked in want of taming, and he liked that. She probably hated her hair, being female. He knew better.

  As he rose and mentally appreciated her too-generous mouth and somewhat Nordic nose, his solicitor’s brain also tried to assemble facts on a different level, for she’d intimated something about his dear Mrs. Wyeth.

  “You knew how much ice was on hand,” he said, as if accusing a clerk of reading his private correspondence.

  She accused right back. “You aren’t a little old fellow hunched over his desk at the Inns of Court.”

  Whatever that meant. “You knew your way to my kitchen, without the least guidance.”

  “I assumed you’d need somebody to keep you from stumbling into the butler’s pantry. I took pity on an absentee landlord.”

  “Absentee owner,” he retorted, his brain still unhappy with the logical conclusion.

  “Absentee, in any case.” Her humble bench might have been a throne for all the disdain in her glare.

  “What is your name?” He softened his tone, in deference to another one of God’s impending nasty jokes. She might, were there a merciful Deity, be an acquaintance of his housekeeper’s, one accustomed to the friendly cup of tea after services.

  Which were held five miles away, if memory served.

  “My name is Jacaranda Wyeth.”

  “I don’t suppose your dear mama is in my employ?” What sort of name was Jacaranda, and why was he doomed to deal with women who were unforthcoming regarding the simplest truths?

  “I am in your employ, or I was as of recently.”

  “You’re not quitting.” He used his best unruly-client voice. Settled ’em down instantly, though the effect on little Avery was less immediate with each application.

  She tipped her chin up a mere but ominous quarter inch.

  Damn and blast, she was magnificent. And troublesome.

  The worst of his many weaknesses was for troublesome women.

  “Drink your tea.” This earned him another quarter inch of chin-raising. “Please, Mrs. Wyeth, lest it grow cold.”

  Then the thought of warming her up, warming up all that magnificent temple cat- beautiful-exotic-Celtic-woman rippled across his imagination, and he had to sit down again.

  Beside her unforthcoming self.

  Of course.

  She drank her tea, proving even a joking God wasn’t without compassion, for Kettering needed the time to think of cold eel pie, privy rats, and those unruly clients.“You are my housekeeper, then?”

  “And you are my employer.” She pushed her mug away.

  Worth refilled it and stirred in cream and sugar. A bachelor developed such habits, or he’d start looking about for a hostess.

  “How came you to be in the pond at such an hour?”

  “Today was long and hot,” she said, taking a sip of her tea. “A little dip spares the maids having to lug water and the footmen having to haul the tub. The staff knows to leave me the privacy of the pond after dark.”

  He believed her. Not a single underfootman would dare lurk among the bushes to spy on her, lest the lad find himself turned off without a character the next morning by the vision most likely to have haunted his dreams.

  “The staff is all abed?”

  “Carl will be on duty by the front door. He’s reliable, and we knew you might show up in advance of your coaches.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I am in correspondence with Lewis, your house steward, who suggested you might not travel in the coach with the young ladies. Horseback is faster and likely preferable in all but wet weather.”

  He did not have a weakness for the managing variety of women, no matter how tall, pretty or troublesome. Particularly not for managing, unforthcoming women—though she’d suffered a knock on the head and hadn’t quite been deceitful.

  “Can you call a maid to stay up with you? You might slip into a coma if we let you sleep through the night.”

  “The blow to my temple didn’t render me insensate, so much as the prospect of your unwanted attentions disconcerted me.”

  He was silent for a moment, trying to find a different meaning for her words and failing.

  “My attentions, as you call them, were in aid of preserving your life. If you seek to put period to your existence, you have my condolences. I’m still not letting you quit, though. Not until my little family sortie in the teeming jungles of Surrey is complete.”

  “You have a very crude grasp of the employer-employee relationship,” she informed him, finishing her tea. “Even you must understand I can give notice whenever I please.”

  He considered her, considered she was pale and wet and cold, and probably in need of a hot bath and some cosseting, else she would not be so sour-natured in the face of his consideration and concern.

  More than physical comforts, she probably wanted privacy.

  “Come.” He rose and held out a hand. “I will escort you to your chambers and see you safely to bed. You can refine your insults and ingratitudes in lieu of sleep.”

  She took his hand, but only after perusing it as if to examine him for scales, claws, or evidence of barnyard relatives. Then she weaved when she gained her feet, which necessitated Worth once more putting an arm around her waist. That she again permitted such behavior suggested she really wasn’t doing very well.

  Served the ungrateful baggage right.

  The housekeeper at Trysting had her own private parlor and sleeping chamber. Those hadn’t moved in the five years since Worth’s last visit, and Mrs. Wyeth let him escort her there without further comment.

  He would not worry over her silence.

  When they reached her door, he pushed it open, seeing no candle lit.

  “This won’t do,” he muttered, propping her against the wall and taking down the lamp from the sconce. He lit a branch of candles in her parlor, enough that the room was minimally illuminated.

  “Shall I light you a fire?”

  “You shall not.” She stood by the door, his jacket closed about her in a two-handed grip.

  “Then get you into bed. You’re one breeze away from the shivers.”

  “You have my thanks for your efforts.” But, of course, she didn’t move.

  “For God’s sake, woman, if I were intent on taking advantage, I’d have done so outside, in the dark, far from those who’d hear you scream, and well before you regained the use of your viper’s tongue.”

  He moved to the bedroom and lit a candle beside her bed.

  Other solicitors referred to Worth Kettering as “a detail man.” The compliment was grudging, usually offered by somebody who wasn’t a detail man. Sloppiness in a solicitor was a deadly sin, as far as Kettering was concerned, but he also understood that discipline took a man only so far toward cataloging every minute aspect of a situation.

  Beyond that point, an ability to perceive details was a God-given gift.

  Jacaranda Wyeth’s quarters revealed myriad details to him.

  She was orderly, even in her privacy.

  She liked pretty things, embroidered pillow cases, aromatic roses, a soft, quilted bedspread nearly the same color as her eyes, white lace curtains. Frilly, female things that belied the no-nonsense composure of her count
enance.

  He withdrew from the bedroom and found her still by the sitting room door, her teeth chattering.

  “Get your wet things off. I’ll be back with some hot water for your ablutions, and a tray.”

  He left her before she could insult him again, which meant he moved quickly, replacing the lamp on the sconce and heading for the kitchen. Putting together a tray of buttered bread, cheese, and raspberry jam took no time at all. Neither did filling an ewer of hot water from the well on the range.

  He didn’t knock on Mrs. Wyeth’s door, because his hands were full. He pushed the door open with his hip to find the sitting room empty. The door to the bedroom was closed, so he put the tray on a low table—lacy runner, bouquet of roses in a crystal vase—and tapped on the bedroom door.

  “Don’t you dare come in here.”

  “I’ve brought you water and sustenance. I’m off to fetch a teapot. You’re quite welcome.”

  He took the time to change into a dry shirt, pajama pants and dressing gown along the way, happy to find his trunks already waiting in his room. When he returned to Mrs. Wyeth’s suite with the tea tray and set it beside the food, she still hadn’t emerged.

  “Either present yourself now or expect company in your bedroom, Mrs. Wyeth. I can’t have you falling and banging your head again.” He couldn’t shout, either, else he’d wake the house, and it wasn’t time for that maneuver in any case, because she opened the door, a wrapper having replaced his jacket.

  But, still, she was cold. Her lips were blue, her teeth chattered, and her eyes had turned to chips of periwinkle ice, for her discomfort was no doubt all his fault.

  “For God’s sake, come here.” He grasped her by one fine-boned wrist and pulled her into his embrace. “You will catch an ague with all this damned pride, pardon the language.” He scooped her up against his chest and settled with her on the sofa, her “d-d-don’t you d-d-dare” hissed right in his ear. He twitched an afghan down from the back of the sofa and draped it over her as she squirmed in his lap.

  “Hush, woman. You’re cold, I’m warm, and a chill can be dangerous. Tolerate my proximity for five minutes, and I’ll leave you in peace.”