A Most Unsuitable Groom. Kasey Michaels

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      Mariah moaned again, her eyes shut tight. “If I had a pistol, I’d shoot you,” she told Spencer quietly. “Just put me somewhere—and then go away.”

      “Go away, is it? Should have said that sooner,” Anguish whispered to no one in particular, unfortunately not that quietly. “Would have saved us all a boatload of bother.”

      Spencer’s last sight of Rian as he carried Mariah toward the stairs was of his brother sliding down the wall, clutching his stomach as he laughed uproariously at the Irishman’s assessment of his brother’s predicament.

      Mariah kept her eyes closed as Spencer carried her up the stairs, holding her breath against the pain of the contraction and the added pain she felt each time he jostled her as he climbed the stairs, not opening them again until she felt herself being laid on cool sheets.

      When his arms left her, when he stood back from the bed, she felt curiously abandoned.

      “When?” he asked her, his dark eyes boring into her. “Where?”

      “What does it matter?” she asked in return. “Believe me, it was considerably less than unforgettable. Go away.”

      “Do as she says,” Odette told him as the Indian woman stepped between them to begin stripping Mariah out of her clothing. “Go downstairs and fall into a bottle. It’s what men do. Women know what to do here.”

      “But—” Spencer knew when he was beaten. “All right. But she and I have to talk. I have to understand how this happened.”

      Odette’s white teeth flashed bright against her dark face. “Boy, I think you already know how. Now go.”

      Spencer stomped out into the hallway to see Jacko standing there in baggy brown trousers, his nightshirt hanging over his large, tight belly and dropping all the way to his bare knees. The man’s eyes were fairly dancing. “Rian came to tell me your news. Congratulations, papa.”

      Spencer spoke without thinking, because a wise man never gave Jacko an opening he could slip his tongue through. “I don’t even remember her.”

      “You bedded what Rian tells me is a fine-looking woman and you don’t remember? Ah, bucko, there’s all kinds of hell, aren’t there? But I think you’ve managed to conjure up a new one.”

      “As long as I can amuse you, then it’s all right,” Spencer said, heading for the stairs only to be stopped by his sister Eleanor, who had come out into the hallway in her dressing gown. Had Rian run from chamber to chamber, ringing a bell and banging on every door, eager to tell everyone?

      “Spencer,” Eleanor asked, “is there anything I can do to help?”

      He thought about this for a moment as he looked at his sister. So small, so fragile and beautiful. Yet Eleanor and her Jack had almost single-handedly dismantled the Red Men Gang last year. If there was anyone whom he could count on to move mountains, it would be Eleanor. Calm, steadfast Elly.

      “Odette’s in with her, Elly, and her own Indian nurse. But,” he said, a thought just then striking him, “you could answer a question for me, one Odette would box my ears for asking. How long, um…” He hesitated, waving one hand in front of him. “You know. How long from…beginning to end?”

      Elly blinked, then smiled. “You’re asking me the length of a pregnancy, Spencer?”

      He nodded, looking back at the door to Morgan’s bedchamber, to see Jacko stepping forward to hold open the door for two of the Becket Hall women, Edyth and Birdie, to enter with pots of steaming water and an armful of towels. This was happening. This was really happening.

      “I would say approximately nine months, Spencer,” Elly told him. “So that would be…last September?”

      Spencer shook his head. “No, that can’t be right. We didn’t meet the Americans at the swamp until the beginning of October. So that’s…that’s…” He began counting on his fingers, then looked at his sister before looking at the closed door, his stomach suddenly uneasy. “It’s too soon, isn’t it? If it’s mine.”

      “If it’s yours? Spencer?”

      He held up his hands to ward off the harder tone of Eleanor’s voice. “It’s mine. Odette says so. The woman says so. I’m the fornicating son of a three-legged cur. I just don’t remember. Why don’t I remember?”

      “You had that knock on the head,” Jacko reminded him. “Your shoulder, your leg, the knock on the head, that fever that hung on for months according to Clovis. Damn, boy, I’d say the woman had her wicked way with you when you couldn’t fight her off. You lucky devil.”

      “Jacko.”

      One word, just one, from Eleanor and Jacko lost his smile and much of his swagger. “I was just saying…”

      “Yes, and now that you have, you will forget you’ve said it, please,” Eleanor told him as if she were a governess scolding her young charge. “Now, you boys go downstairs to Papa, who had the good sense not to come up here, and I will go in with the ladies and offer my assistance if it is needed as I introduce myself to your young woman.”

      “She’s not my—” Spencer gave it up as a bad job. “You’ll let us know what’s happening?”

      “I will,” Eleanor said, her smile soft. “What’s her name, Spencer? I should most probably know that.”

      “Rutledge. Mariah Rutledge. And she’s English. But that’s all I know. Damn it all to hell, Elly, that’s all I know.”

      And that hair, that voice…

      Spencer pressed his fingers against his temples, hoping for more memories to assert themselves. But there was nothing. He did not know this woman, remember this woman. “Go downstairs, everyone, before we wake Fanny and Callie. I’m…I’m going to go talk to Clovis.”

      He walked briskly toward the servant stairs and climbed to the top floor of the large house to where Anguish and Clovis had been installed upon their arrival at Becket Hall.

      Ainsley had given them the run of the house if they’d wanted it, in thanks for bringing Spencer back to Becket Hall, but neither man had felt comfortable with that sort of free and easy arrangement. After all, as Clovis pointed out, they were only doing their duty. Hiding them from an army they didn’t wish to return to was thanks enough for both of them.

      Still, Becket Hall wasn’t like most English homes, made up of a strict hierarchy of master, master’s family, upper servants, lower servants. No, that wasn’t for Ainsley Becket.

      He had run a taut ship but a fair one, and he ran a fair house. The servants were the crew, each lending a hand to whatever chore was necessary at the moment, and each still very much the individual…individuals who refused to see Ainsley as anyone less than their beloved Cap’n.

      There was no butler or major domo at Becket Hall. Whoever heard the knocker and was close opened the door. When beds needed changing they were changed; when rugs needed beating they were beaten.

      The only area of the house Ainsley considered to be off-limits to himself and most of the household was the kitchens where СКАЧАТЬ