Chapter Five

 

There was a loud, irritating buzzing in his ears, an intrusive noise that rose and fell, then rose again, setting off a tremendous thump-thumping deep inside his head that was far worse than any hangover he could remember.

No, he thought slowly, I don't think I've been drinking. I've been riding; on my way to Scotland, I believe. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut against the pain of thinking. There had been a horse—and a girl. A lovely, fiery-haired creature. A wild race across country. A high stone wall.

Damn!

He wanted to moan at his returning memory, but realized such self-indulgence would take too much effort. He'd come a cropper, he recalled with some shame, sailing off the saddle in the middle of a jump like some green looby who couldn't be trusted to keep a tolerable seat on a plow-horse.

The last thing he could recall with any measure of clarity was twisting his head about frantically in time to see the beautiful female rider—the one he had been out to impress, the one he was so sure had been about to come to grief—sitting safe and unharmed on a soft carpet of vegetation, taking a front row seat, as it were, while he proceeded to make a bloody idiot of himself.

Once he had mentally filled in the blanks on all the questions buffeting back and forth inside his aching head, Lucien decided that the female must have summoned help, for nothing else could explain the fact that he was sure he was now lying on a comfortable bed rather than the rocky ground. Another man might have immediately felt grateful for the rescue, but Leighton could not help but consider the fact that if it hadn't been for the dratted woman's obvious baiting of him, he probably would never have taken the fall in the first place.

For if his head was hurting, that ache was as nothing when compared to the massive mental pain now raging through his male pride. How his friend Philip would laugh at his predicament, Lucien thought ruefully. The dear boy would be overjoyed to see me put at such a disadvantage; he'd probably tell me it was my own fault and then slip a pair of salmon into bed on either side of me for good measure.

As men are not generally known to dwell on thoughts that tend to show them at a disadvantage, Lucien returned his attention to his immediate physical surroundings. Slowly, painfully, his muddled mind concentrating on the sounds he heard coming from some far corner of the room, he decided that it must have been the muffled noise of voices raised in anger that had so rudely intruded on his peace a few minutes earlier.

He struggled to identify the voices. Female. Two of them, jabbering away nineteen to the dozen. Ignorant chippies! Couldn't they tell he was trying to sleep? How could they be so featherbrained, so typically female? Why didn't they shut up and leave him alone?

"You're being ridiculous, Doreen," Lady Penelope was saying, not even trying to keep her voice low, as the man lying in her bed had been unconscious for over two hours and she saw no need to whisper. "You heard the doctor, idiot bumpkin leech though he was. What you're suggesting is the height of folly. The man simply cannot be moved again. Any more upset, and it could prove fatal."

Fatal? Lucien, overhearing, repeated silently, momentarily startled out of his bad humor. Good Lord, how badly am I hurt? He tried again to open his eyes, but even this simple exercise proved costly, and he quickly abandoned the effort as he steeled himself against yet another onslaught of pain. Hey there, you tabbies, he called out mentally, you've got a man dying over here. Do you think you could cease and desist your pointless wrangling for a moment to come over here and hold my hand as I utter my last words?

"Then mayhap can you be tellin' me where it is that you're supposed to sleep, milady, what with that great hulkin' carcass layin' smack in the middle of your bed?" the second voice—obviously that of a servant, and painfully shrill to the Earl's way of thinking—asked belligerently.

What are you worrying about, you daft woman? he groused silently. If I'm dying, your mistress will have her dratted bed back soon enough. There was just no pleasing a woman, he rued with a small smirk, boosting his flagging spirits a trifle. Well, Lucien decided, about to stick his spoon in the wall or nay, he'd by God had more than enough of this caterwauling. "Why don't you two chattering magpies put a muzzle on it and flutter off to leave me die in peace?" he growled irritably.

"How dare you, sirrah!" Lady Penelope declared at once, her husky voice openly challenging as she whirled in the direction of the huge bed. "You will kindly stay out of this conversation. Oh, my goodness, Doreen! How stupid of me! He's awake! Quickly, see if you can catch up with that silly doctor before he scampers off."

"Yes, Doreen, dearest, why don't you do that?" Lucien agreed nastily from his rack of pain. "Perhaps then he will be so kind as to provide you with a nice thick bandage with which you can stuff up your mistress's mouth."

The maid quickly looked back and forth between her glowering mistress and their rude patient, sniffing the tension that suddenly hung thick in the air between the two. "You know I can't leave you alone with him, milady, '' she pointed out in a fierce whisper, firmly placing her hands on her ample hips. "It wouldn't be fittin', and that's a fact. Besides, if he keeps up with openin' his potato trap like that, you might just take it into your head to murder him before I get back. I can see that look in your eyes."

Lady Penelope took hold of the servant's upper arm and steered her toward the open doorway. "Don't be silly. This is no time to be worrying about propriety. Besides, he's probably just delirious," she added under her breath, just as if she had not, in fact, been entertaining the pleasure she would doubtless derive from throttling the ungrateful brute. "The man has a wrenched ankle, three cracked ribs, and a bump on his head the size of a turnip. I scarcely think he's in any condition to toss me onto the carpet and ravish me. Now, go!" She then shoved Doreen inelegantly out of the room, loudly slamming the door on the flustered maid's departing back.

From behind her, Lady Penelope could hear every low, forceful word of the pithy epithet Lucien Kenrick was using to colorfully describe any female so sapskulled as to shoot off a brace of cannon while a man was trying to concentrate on producing an articulate death rattle.

Turning around just in time to see her patient employing one shaky hand to inspect the heavy white bindings that half-covered his head, Lady Penelope warned loudly, "Stop touching that bandage. Keep your hand down! You have to remain still, you fool. You've had an accident, and you're badly hurt. Though I must say I'm beginning to feel that it's more than just a slight shame that you didn't manage to break your jawbone while you were about it, for it would have made my job that much easier."

"I love you, too, sweetings," Leighton responded tightly, trying once more to open his eyes. He did, however, return his hand to his side, not because of Lady Penelope's order, but because just that small bit of movement had left him feeling as if he had broken every second bone in his pain-racked body. He amended his plans for a self-examination, thinking it best to wait upon the doctor's return before he inadvertently did himself any more damage.

What he would concentrate on now was the mighty effort of opening his eyes. Realizing that the pressure on his forehead came from the heavy bandage that was pressing down hard on his eyebrows, he stopped fighting it and merely raised his eyelids a fraction, looking down toward the end of the bed and the slim female body that stood there, arms crossed at the waist.

His vision was limited to the central area of her body, but it was sufficient to tell him that he was looking at his recent racing companion. "Blue, one of my favorite colors," he remarked, recalling the riding habit he had chased the length of some farmer's field. "What are you doing here anyway? Shouldn't you be off somewhere, embroidering slippers or something? Ladies are of no use in a sickroom."

Out of a long list of comments Lucien could have made, he had unerringly lighted on the one thing that was sure to set Lady Penelope soaring off into the treetops with anger. After all, she had just spent a very trying few hours. All that had been required of him was that he lie quietly, while it had been left to her to do all the work.

She had been ignominiously tossed off her horse and flung onto the hard ground, somehow inflicting a fatal tear to the skirt of her absolutely favorite riding habit. She had then been scared witless, believing that the man now lying in her bed making cutting remarks at her expense had been killed because of her juvenile wish for a bit of frolic.

The entire time she had been rounding up the two horses—both miraculously unhurt, but the stallion proving to be deucedly hard to capture and tie to a tree—she had been promising the good Lord everything she could think of if only He would spare her having the blood of this innocent man on her hands. She would be good, she had vowed on a sob; she would mend her Evil Ways and listen to her papa, who had warned her time and again that one day her little pranks and playful nature would end in disaster. If only the man would be all right, she had bargained fervently, she would nurse him back to health as penance for her sins; all the while being a pattern card of docility and humble contrition.

As if her own fears had not been enough, Lady Penelope had then found herself having to deal with the idiot Benedict butler, Farnley, who had seen her approaching the house at the head of a strange parade that numbered Nemesis and herself, a riderless horse, and a well-dressed but for the moment unconscious gentleman being carried along behind—lying on top of a fence gate balanced between four muscular local farm lads Lady Penelope had spied in a nearby field and hastily commandeered into service.

Farnley, whom she had foolishly assumed would immediately take charge of the situation, had instead shown all the signs of imminent insanity, racing about the foyer wringing his pencil-thin hands and wailing something about a beetle having run across his shoe just that morning in the herb garden, so that he had felt sure there would be a death in the household before evening.

That had left the farm lads—whose brawn seemed not to be limited to their strong backs, but also to exist in ample supply between their freckled, jug-handled ears— to panic, causing them to immediately drop the fence gate and scamper off, while the unconscious gentleman slowly rolled over to land nose down in the mud beside the brick path.

As if that had not been enough (although Lady Penelope was sure she would have been hard-pressed to find anyone in all of the world so mean natured as to believe what she had already suffered was not enough), her Aunt Lucinda had then flitted to the open doorway, seen the very still form lying sprawled in the path, screeched, "'O! woe is me, To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!' Shakespeare," and then promptly fainted into Lady Penelope's startled embrace.

No, all in all, this wasn't exactly the optimum moment for her ungrateful patient to employ sarcasm at her expense.

"Oh, do be quiet! You're in no position to be rude," she shot at him huffily, her disdain for all men blinding her temporarily to the fact that this particular man was lying before her injured and helpless. "Who do you think you are, anyway?"

Lucien opened his mouth to tell the lady exactly who he was, a move that should immediately render her speechless (a notion that, considering the aching state of his head, appealed more with each passing moment), but quickly thought better of it. A wise man first scented out the landscape before committing himself to anything. After all, he was in no position to escape wherever he was, and he did not much care to be put at a disadvantage. No, for the time being he would keep his identity his own little secret.

Finally, just as Lady Penelope (who had belatedly remembered that she had promised to be good if only this man's life could be spared) was about to do something quite rare—beg forgiveness for her behavior—Lucien said in what could only be called an apologetic tone: "Could we possibly gnaw on that particular bone at some other time? Pardon me, please, but for the moment that small bit of information seems determined to elude me."

"Ah, sweet Jesus, the poor fella," Doreen Sweeney, overhearing, exclaimed, crossing herself. She had just reentered the sickroom to report that the doctor—after pouring down two glasses of Mrs. Benedict's small store of port—had gone off to attend the lying-in of Squire Nevin's second-best milk cow. "Doesn't know who he is, does he? You want to know what it was? It was that pop on his noggin what did it, Lady Penelope, sure as check. Do you think he'll be dyin' then?"

Lady Penelope? Lucien marveled, a tingle of apprehension running down his spine. Could this possibly be Philip's Penelope? The Nose? Of all the dratted coincidences, this one bore off the palm! His breath hissed audibly through his teeth as Lucien thanked his lucky stars for keeping his counsel about his identity even while he silently cursed Hawkedon for misleading him about his sister's overwhelming good looks.

Lady Penelope quickly put a finger to her lips to silence her maid, who had already blessed herself three times and was now fumbling in her apron pocket for her rosary beads. "He's not going to die, Doreen," she assured her, "unless you've just succeeded in scaring the poor gentleman to death. Now why don't you go downstairs and brew up some of your special tea for our invalid—you say it helps anything."

It was true; Doreen had been plying her specially brewed tea at Weybridge Manor ever since her arrival, lauding its power to reduce swellings, cure headaches, and ease stomach pains better than any medicine. But she was a wise woman, and knew her limitations. "And when did I ever say my tea was a magic potion that could right a scrambled brain?" she prodded, shaking her head. "Lord love a duck, milady, it's more than a few tea leaves that sorry fella's needin'."

Lady Penelope was fast losing her patience. Once more escorting her maid to the door of the chamber, she repeated her suggestion, amending it to include brewing an extra cup of tea for Aunt Lucinda who, as far as Lady Penelope knew, was still lying sprawled on a small divan in her own chambers, mumbling random lines from Paradise Lost.

"And don't feel you have to hurry back," she ended, just before closing the door and turning the key in the lock.

Doreen meant well, Lady Penelope mused as she turned back to her patient, who was now lying quietly in the bed, his hands curled into tight fists at his sides. He seemed to be all right, but overhearing much more of the maid's concerns might be more than the poor man could handle in his present weakened state. Walking softly across the room to stand beside the high bed, Lady Penelope looked down at her patient assessingly, taking in the fact that the man's toes stretched down the length of the bed under the covers fully a foot more than her own small body would have.

His shoulders, hidden beneath the white lawn nightshirt Doreen had unearthed from the small, wrapped packet one of the servants had detached from the stallion's saddle, were quite broad, definitely more muscular in form than those of her brother Philippos, who had always been the model against whom she had measured all other men.

And he was so dark. His hair, especially now, banded about as it was with the white bandage the doctor had placed there, seemed as dark as a moonless night, and his eyes, what little she had seen of them, reminded her of two chips of hard, black coal. He was five and thirty if he was a day, she decided, still comparing the man to her brother, whom she knew to be a youthful-looking thirty.

No, he was nothing like Philippos or the twins or, for that matter, anyone of her acquaintance. He exuded power, even lying there motionless beneath the covers, and he had the air of one who was used to command. She was convinced he must be feeling absolutely helpless, and his ill humor was clear evidence that he would prove to be a horrible invalid, not that she could find it in her heart to blame him. She should think she'd be even more terrible if their roles were reversed.

So thinking, Lady Penelope reached down to tuck the covers more carefully around the man's injured ribs, saying kindly, "My maid is gone now, sir. I'm sorry if she upset you, but she's Irish, you understand, and prone to indulging in displays of emotion. I notice you haven't said anything in quite some time. I assure you, the doctor has told us you should be fit again very soon, so please don't worry."

"You can have no idea how that piece of information relieves my mind, Lady Penelope," Lucien replied pointedly, reaching up to grab her wrist in his grip. "Please excuse me for my earlier rudeness, ma'am, but I do believe I am not quite myself—whoever that is."

"Oh, no, on the contrary. Please forgive me," Lady Penelope apologized, looking down to where Lucien's hand held her. "You've had quite a shock, haven't you. I really can't blame you for being a little out of sorts. Are you quite sure you can't remember your name?"

So this is Philip's little sister, is it? he thought, looking up into Lady Penelope's flushed features. Beautiful she might be, but she has the disposition of a warthog caught in a trap. Lord save me from willful women! Philip should have had no fear of my tumbling into love with the chit.

Philip!

What a damnable mess he had landed himself in this time. If Philip got wind of it, there'd be the devil to pay for sure, with his friend hying himself over here as fast as he could to hurry the romance along, just to ease his own conscience over declaring for Dorinda Redfern. The fellow would be beside himself with glee, knowing he had a captive audience for his schemes. Lucien didn't put it past his friend to even engineer a compromising situation between himself and the beauteous Lady Penelope.

"Sir?" Lady Penelope prompted when Lucien made no reply to her question.

"I'm quite sure I can't remember, ma'am," he lied, lowering his eyelids and trying his best to look pitiful. She had gotten him into this mess, the little minx, and he could see no reason to ease her conscience in the matter. "Perhaps—perhaps if you could tell me how I came to be lying in this bed, and exactly where we are?"

Feeling it prudent to put off the explanation of how he had come to tumble off his horse until later—when her wrist was no longer within reach of his surprisingly strong hand—Lady Penelope decided to answer the second half of his question first. "You're in my Aunt Lucinda's house, just outside Wormhill, near Buxton, in Derbyshire. That's in England, you know," she added scrupulously. "I don't know what people in your condition can remember."

"Wormhill." He made the name sound like some noxious weed. "Ah, what a poetic name. I must have been passing by to somewhere else. Even if I am not quite sure who I am, I have the distinct feeling I am not someone who would voluntarily be stopping in Wormhill for the Season."

"Not all of us have the option of staying where we will," Lady Penelope shot back, stung. "Besides, it is not such a terrible place. I understand the natives often stay up past their ten o'clock prayers, libertine creatures that they are."

"Then you, too, are a visitor to fair Wormhill?" Oh, yes, this is the Nose all right. If nothing else, I've got to admire her spunk.

Lucien's last question brought up memories of the Marquess's parting words to her, words that left Lady Penelope with no illusions as to her fate if she dared to blot her copybook during her sojourn at Lucinda Benedict's. "You might say that," she admitted, finally succeeding in getting back possession of her left wrist and then walking across to the window to look out over the barren garden. "I only arrived today, for a visit that should not extend past the first day of spring. I had thought myself to be utterly bored here in the country, but your unfortunate accident seems to have changed all that. As my aunt, your real hostess, is not quite up to nursing you, sir, I shall be in charge of your recovery. It is only fitting."

My, my sweetings, don't sound so overjoyed. Aloud, he only said, "And that, I believe, brings us back to how I got here. Was there a carriage accident?"

Deliberately keeping her back turned to him, Lady Penelope said shortly, "You took a fall from your horse near here. You have a badly sprained ankle, I'm afraid, as well as a few cracked ribs and that bump on your head. Actually, you should be resting, trying to regain your strength. Your memory will probably come back to you soon enough, so there's really no need to dwell on the details of the accident right now, is there?"

Lucien Kenrick knew a guilty conscience when he heard one, and although he longed to close his eyes and go to sleep, he pushed on, goading Lady Penelope deliberately.

"You perhaps witnessed this accident, ma'am? I am much distressed, and can only hope being told exactly what transpired might jog me into remembering my name. You cannot know how helpless I am feeling at the moment, how cast adrift I imagine myself to be. Please, Lady Penelope. Surely you cannot mean to leave me lying here . . . alone . . . wondering."

Lady Penelope tried hard—very hard—to count to ten, remembering her promise to be good, but it was not to be. Her guilt (colliding with the sickening realization that she had promised to nurse this infuriating man back to health) goaded her into whirling about to blurt, "It wasn't all my fault!"

Leighton turned his head slightly in her direction, to find that the pain of this movement was well worth the sight Lady Penelope presented to his weary eyes. Her long, unbound hair seemed to take on a life of its own as it swirled about her head, and her beautiful, darkly lashed eyes were suddenly two sparkling green pools of liquid emerald.

She was, he decided appreciatively, a completely female female—all fire and emotion, and fiercely passionate. "Your fault?" he asked, pretending shocked disbelief at her outburst. "You did this to me?"

"Don't interrupt me!" she countered, pointing a finger at him in warning. "It wasn't as if I asked you to race me, for heaven's sake. And then when you didn't rein in as we neared the wall, I thought you must have known the jump was safe, but you didn't, did you?"

"I didn't? How remiss of me."

"No, you did not! You kept on racing toward the jump anyway, just as if you knew what you were doing, so how was I to know you were just being stupid? And then there was suddenly this hay cart on the other side of the wall, and we both ended by being tossed from the saddle. I managed to land without hurting myself. It was only you who was so addlepated as to hit your head on the edge of the hay cart."

"My list of sins grows by the moment. Do you suppose I've suffered enough, or would you rather I'd expired on the instant, thus satisfying your thirst for revenge?" Clearly Leighton was enjoying himself, and just as clearly Lady Penelope was becoming more incensed.

"How dare you make fun of me!" she exclaimed. "You can't even begin to imagine the trouble you have been to me ever since your fall, just as if I hadn't enough on my plate as it was—what with Papa's threats—without you coming along to make my life even more complicated. Well, let me tell you, Mister Whatever Your Name Is, I may have to shoulder my share of the blame for your present condition, I may have to nurse you until you discover who you are and are well enough to leave my aunt's household, I may even have to give some consideration to there being the slight possibility of some faint sense in my father's warnings, but I want to make one thing perfectly clear to you: I will not like it. I will not like it one single bit!"

Leighton found it was now possible to open his eyes completely, a feat he had accomplished only moments after Lady Penelope had first launched into her passionate tirade, finding himself not so injured that he could not appreciate the sight of a handsome woman in full fury.

He continued to watch, entranced, as she unwittingly aided him by filling in the remainder of the puzzle pieces in his mental picture of her present situation. Now—adding what she had told him to what Philip had already supplied—slowly, carefully, a plan began to form in his mind.

Once her outburst was over, she seemed to be totally at a loss as to anything else to say, and only spread her arms wide in an expression of impotence, then fled the room, never seeing the small smile that had formed on Lucien's lips.

"Oh, sweetings," he breathed once she was gone, carefully easing himself into a more comfortable position, "you're really in a pickle, aren't you? Poor, headstrong, spoiled infant. I do believe I shall enjoy putting you through a few hoops."