Sinfully Ever After (Book Club Belles Society) Read online

  She shifted away from him on the seat. “I sincerely hope you’re not suggesting I become your mistress?”

  He gave her a quick frown. “But…why else do you suppose I have spent time here with you?”

  “I thought you liked our village. And you came to visit your cousins.”

  “Becky, I came for you. I have battled these last twelve months with my feelings, but they cannot be denied. Father insists I make a good marriage, but there is naught amiss with keeping a dalliance on the side, a sensible woman who can be discreet.”

  The abandoned stone shepherd’s shack was ahead of them now and he steered the horses toward it.

  “I knew the moment I saw you that we were destined to be together,” he added.

  Becky was alarmed. She could never have imagined his thoughts to have traveled so far ahead. His flirtation was nothing she took to heart. It confused her sometimes, but she just assumed that was her own fault for being unfamiliar with the habit.

  As he slowed the curricle, she readied her skirt to step down and make a run for it. “I fear, sir, you have made a mistake, a misjudgment of my character, if you think I would be content as any man’s mistress.”

  He was crestfallen, his voice quite desperate. “But you are my chère amie.”

  She leaped down and marched into the shack to shelter from the rain.

  With dazed eyes, she looked around the interior, at the bottle of Madeira, the lantern, the tapestry pillows that she recognized from Mrs. Makepiece’s parlor. She thought of her friends’ faces watching her leave with Charles, all of them no doubt thinking he was the reason for her sudden exit.

  “We can read poetry, if you like,” he exclaimed, darting by her and throwing out his arms. “And I will write countless sonnets to your auburn hair.”

  She looked at him, sighed, and tucked her hands in her muff. “Are you in your cups, by chance?”

  “No! Well, I had a few at the Pig in a Poke, but I have all my wits about me.”

  “I beg to differ.” She suspected the few wits he had were ready to flee in shame as soon as he was sober again.

  Rain had begun to fall, spitting spitefully down upon them through the leaky rafters of the roof.

  “Damn this weather!” Charles exclaimed, staring out through the open door to where his horses grazed. “The leather hood doesn’t fit right and the seats won’t dry for hours. Well, we may as well stay a while, even if you are being a dreadful, frosty sulk.”

  She shook her head. What a fool she had been to think he enjoyed her company and conversation. That he enjoyed walking with her. All the time, she was supposed to read between the lines. This, as Mrs. Kenton would say, was the problem with being raised motherless. She did need advice. But she didn’t like asking for it. Or hearing it.

  Walking by him, she passed out into the full onslaught of rain. All she could think about now was the long walk back to the village in the rain.

  “Becky!” He grabbed her arm. “We’ll stay warm together inside and wait for the storm to pass.”

  “That roof leaks, Charles,” she replied dully.

  He had not thought of practical matters like the weather when he prepared this secret little love nest for his “chère amie.”

  He reached for her. It was not really a tussle, but she did pull one way and he the other. To a passing person, it might seem as if he meant to hurt her. Certainly, it must have seemed that way to the irate dog that appeared out of nowhere and launched itself, jaws bared in a menacing growl, at Charles Clarendon’s trespassing arm.

  The dog’s fangs made contact and Charles cursed, kicking out at the animal. He released Becky and she stumbled on the wet, muddy grass.

  “Ness,” she shouted, recognizing the dog. “Stop, Ness!”

  Although the dog had dropped the imagined assailant’s sleeve, Charles was enraged, veins popping out on his neck. He kicked out again and grabbed his whip from the curricle, but Becky leaped in his way, defending the growling dog.

  “No. He thought I was in danger. Don’t hurt him.”

  “Stand aside and I’ll beat the dog. Teach him a lesson!”

  “No! Stop it at once, Charles. I cannot abide cruelty.”

  Ness had run up to paw at her skirt and Becky saw that the dog was bleeding.

  “Something has happened,” she exclaimed in alarm. “He’s never out without his master.” Squinting through the hard, driving rain, she looked down the hill and searched the road as far as she could see it in both directions, but there was no sign of Luke. Her heart was in her throat, for she knew then that the dog had run up there looking for help.

  Charles was too angry to be sensible. He refused to go looking for the colonel. “I think you care more about a dog than you do about me. Look, he made me bleed!”

  There was a slight graze on his wrist between glove and coat cuff. No more than a scratch. “Please, let us take the curricle and look, Charles. He could be hurt down there somewhere.”

  But again he refused. His face white with anger, he would not let her take the curricle, nor would he leave the doorway of the shack, where the stone lintel kept him partially dry.

  She gave up. There was no more time to waste. “Come on, Ness. Show me where he is, boy!”

  * * *

  The two thugs had come out of nowhere—or more specifically, they had ridden up on him from behind as he walked by the river, leading his horse and tossing sticks for Ness. He heard their hooves and had stopped, expecting them to pass. Instead they reined blows down upon him and he fell into the bulrushes. He blacked out.

  When next Luke opened his eyes, he had blood in his mouth and his ears were ringing. But there was Ness, padding around his head, licking at his hair. And there were two feet in soaking wet ladies’ boots.

  “For pity’s sake, what have you done now?”

  He didn’t know if he was wet most from the rain or the river. Or the blood. They must have beaten him further after he fell, and then they rode off, disturbed perhaps by the fierce attack from his faithful mutt. Ness had taken a few blows himself, but he was a tough little bastard.

  His head was spinning, and when he tried to raise it, the sensation was much worse. “Go away, wench,” he muttered, spitting out blood. She was one of the last people he wanted to see him like this, since her impression of him was so very bad already.

  “Oh, don’t thank me for coming to help you.” She bent over, grabbed him under the shoulders, and tried hauling him out of the bulrushes, but his weight was too much for her.

  “Leave it,” he groaned. “I’m all right. ’Tis only a bit of a scrape.”

  “Bit of a scrape?”

  “I’ve had worse.” He laughed and then winced as that vibration turned to fire scorching in his ribs. “And I daresay it’s not the last time,” he wheezed. He wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that Kit Clarendon had sent those men in retaliation for the well-deserved beating Luke gave him years before. “I think they stole my horse!”

  “Men!” exclaimed his Gingersnap. “Good Lord!”

  “Could you stop shouting in my ear, please? I hurt enough. And why are you shouting at me? I didn’t beat myself about the head, woman.”

  Eventually she managed to get him sitting up and then she found his cane in the bulrushes, wiped it on her coat, and put it into his hands. By leaning on her and the cane, he was able to get up on his feet again.

  Fortunately, they had not stumbled far when the blacksmith happened by with his cart, and he took them back to the village.

  “I can’t go back to the manor,” he gasped out, holding his side. “I don’t want Sarah to see this. Or my brother, for that matter.”

  The woman, for once, did not argue with him, so he knew he must look very bad indeed. She had taken a handkerchief out of her muff and used it to wipe blood and dirt from his face. “You can stay with P
apa and me,” she said firmly, taking control of the situation just as he suspected she always had done.

  Rebecca was remarkably composed in the sight of so much blood. He didn’t think she would ever stop impressing him.

  She was still wiping his face and it felt very good. Very good. So he kept pointing out more blood for her to find. There was plenty.

  Twenty-seven

  Luke was soon installed in her brother’s bedroom, despite a few salty protests about what “people” might think about him staying there.

  “Oh, do shut up,” she exclaimed. “You don’t want to go to the manor, so where else is there? Who else would have you? I’m quite sure no decent soul wants you lying around on their furniture. Fortunately, however, I don’t have much of a reputation worth saving.” She knew that these days many villagers considered her a scarlet woman, because of all the rumors, first about Lucky Luke and then Charles Clarendon. But she had decided it was her turn not to care for once. She’d spent enough years being the one who worried.

  Besides, promising to marry someone on a wager, she’d found, did peculiar things to a person, complicated their thoughts and feelings. Even when they were usually sensible and clever.

  But now was not the time to think about herself. She had a man to tend and that was one thing she knew she could do. She had the perfect no-nonsense manner, and she was not in the least squeamish. Therefore she threw herself wholeheartedly into the supervision of Lucky Luke. Someone had to do it.

  She pushed him behind the dressing screen in her brother’s room. “Don’t get blood on the carpet.”

  Wincing, he lifted his breeches and dangled them in the air. “I know you’ve been waiting to get these off me, wench.”

  “Naturally.” She snatched up his soiled, torn clothing as he dropped it over the top of the screen. “I’ll bring you a nightshirt of my father’s, but you’d better wash first. Wait there and I’ll bring you some water for the basin.”

  “Wait here?” he grumbled. “Where else can I go now you’ve got me naked?”

  She smiled archly. That might be one way to keep him under her control. With this mischievous thought in mind, she took his clothes down to the fire to burn them. He’d have to make do with a nightshirt until she and her friends had a proper plan of action to make him stay. For Sarah’s sake, of course. No other reason.

  But as she took his waistcoat, poised to discard it in the flames, a pearl and ruby necklace tumbled out from an inside pocket. She caught it in her hand, astonished. What was Lucky Luke doing with such an item in his possession? Something he won gambling, perhaps?

  She suddenly remembered Justina’s missing bracelet, Mrs. Makepiece’s lost silver teaspoons, and the silver milk jug she hadn’t been able to find. Then she thought of how she caught him sneaking about in her hallway on Christmas Eve. He’d claimed to be looking for a fob watch. One she’d never seen.

  Was it possible that Lucky Luke was not only a seducer and a gambler, but also a thief?

  * * *

  Dr. Penny was sent for, and he confirmed that the patient had suffered nothing more than a few bruises and scratches and a nasty cut below his left eye. Nothing broken. Surprisingly. The ruffians must have been disturbed before they could do a more thorough job.

  “For a man of seven-and-thirty, sir, you are in remarkably fine condition, despite being beaten like an old rug.”

  Luke’s brother had warned him of Dr. Penny’s eccentricities—his love of stuffed creatures. “Perhaps he can do something for you,” Darius had muttered dryly. “He once told me he prefers dead patients, so you qualify. Just don’t sit still for too long or he might have you stuffed.”

  Dr. Penny stood at the bedside and scratched his white hair. “But now to the matter of that leg, Colonel. How will you chase after the rapidly moving Miss Sherringham?”

  He scowled and replied gruffly that chasing after that wench was certainly not anything he had in mind to do. He knew she was listening outside the door. “My daughter, Sarah, however, has pestered me to have you look at it. I told her you probably would not be able to help, but she insisted.”

  “I see.” The doctor pulled up a chair and sat. “What happened to the bullet when you were shot? It was removed in a military hospital?”

  “No,” he snapped. “I took it out myself.”

  The doctor’s bushy white brows shook and heaved like the foam on a rocky sea. “You took it out yourself?”

  “Made a bit of a mess of it, but where I was, there were no good doctors.” He rubbed his bad thigh, because the more he talked of it, the more it hurt. “Besides, I saw how they hacked me about when they took the first one out after Assaye. I thought I’d make as good a job of it myself.”

  Dr. Penny shook his head gravely. “Ah, the well-meaning amateur. Thus the healing has resulted in adhesions forming, no doubt. These have contributed to stiffness and restricted, contracted muscular movement. If the leg is not properly exercised…tell me, have you tried thermal springs? Such as those in Bath?”

  He could think of nothing less appealing than a journey to that favorite watering hole of society.

  It must have shown upon his countenance for the doctor chuckled. “I quite agree. I was there once myself and pray there will never be an occasion for me to return. But the natural sulphur will work wonders for you. That, combined with regular massage, will be of tremendous benefit. I suggest you take some time to try the cure. Greater mobility can be restored.”

  Luke agreed morosely that it was something to consider. Once Sarah heard about it, he knew she would have something new to poke him about. She was already talking about one day taking a trip there to dance in the Upper Rooms and see the sights. Now she had another reason to want her “father” to take her there. The responsibilities of parenthood were onerous, to be sure. She had even suggested he might take her shopping for bonnets.

  Dr. Penny left him that day with the genial assertion that he was in good hands.

  So there he was, in Nate Sherringham’s bed, hiding out while his battered and bruised face healed. He could hear the low voices outside on the landing as Rebecca conferred with the physician, and he suspected grimly that this wench would take advantage of him now, while he was at her mercy.

  It would probably be a damn sight worse than what those thugs had done.

  * * *

  To Becky’s extreme irritation, he would not tell her what had happened or who was responsible. “’Tis nothing,” he kept saying with a breezy sigh. “I’ve done worse to myself in my sleep.”

  She would not let him see her laugh, as she was determined to be a strict nurse. No nonsense. Solemn and dignified. Like Mrs. Makepiece.

  “Papa, he will have to stay with us until he is recuperated. Just a day or so,” she told her father as she prepared a tea tray for the invalid. “We cannot let Sarah see her father this way, can we?”

  He agreed at once. “The colonel must stay as long as he needs, m’dear Becky. As long as he needs.”

  Ness was also welcome, of course, and enjoyed a beef and gravy supper before he went to sleep at the foot of his master’s new bed, ready to protect him again as—well, Becky thought, smiling—as Necessary, despite his name.

  “I hope you know your dog saved you,” she told Luke as she carried the tray to his bedside table, lit the candles, and shut the curtains.

  “I wasn’t dying,” he grunted. “I tripped.”

  “Yes, and bumped, many times, against something hard, but I always suspected you had a toughened skull.”

  “Well, I would have got up and been perfectly—”

  “If not for your dog, you would have lain there in the bulrushes, in the rain, and probably caught pneumonia.”

  “Don’t exaggerate, woman.” His dark gaze followed her around the room. “Where did Ness find you, anyway? What were you doing out in the rain so far from the vi
llage?”

  Ah, now that she would rather not tell. “Since you like to keep your secrets,” she replied smugly, “I shall keep mine!”

  “Hmm.” He scowled and his mouth turned down sulkily. “What are folk going to say about me staying here in this house?” The emphasis he placed on the word “folk” suggested he had someone in mind.

  “It’s only a night or two until the worst of the bruising and swelling has gone down,” she assured him. “Don’t worry, the blacksmith who brought you here has been sworn to secrecy, and my friends and I will look after you here, keep your ugly face from frightening poor Sarah.”

  “Your friends?” He clenched his hands into fists on the quilt, and from his tone of voice, anyone might think her friends consisted of Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition.

  She wrote notes to Justina and Diana that evening, and the next day, at the meeting of the Book Club Belles, the three of them shared the secret of Lucky Luke’s whereabouts. Becky did not tell Lucy, of course, for she could not be relied upon to keep the news from Sarah.

  “I shall bring him some of my special broth,” Justina whispered as soon as they had a chance to discuss the matter without the youngest two girls hearing.

  “And I will take some of my mama’s fruit cake,” vowed Diana. “He liked it very much, she said.”

  Becky smoothed her palms over her skirt and said casually, “While he is in our house, I thought we might have the opportunity to help the colonel, in his efforts to reform.”

  Diana and Justina stared at her.

  “It will be a pleasant surprise for Sarah, won’t it?” she added.

  “For Sarah?” Justina smiled.

  “Yes. She would love to have him dance with her at the Manderson assemblies and they open again in another week. We shall have him ready to escort Sarah to the dance.”

  It would do no harm to clean him up, she thought. Little Sarah had tried, but she could only do so much with a stubborn seed ox like Lucky Luke. It needed some stronger hands, clearly.

  The matter of the ruby and pearl necklace she kept to herself, for she had yet to decide what to do about it. Luke had not mentioned the necklace at all, or even asked about his clothes, but he probably assumed they were being cleaned and mended.