"Aren't you at least curious about the value of the collection? I have a feeling they'd fetch a staggering sum if you decided to sell."
"No."
"But why? What possible harm could it do?" she persisted.
"I won't go back to Balfry." The words burst from some buried part of his soul. "My brother, Alec, drowned there when he was five. In the cold waters of the bay. He . . . fell off a cliff."
Society still thought it had been a tragic accident, if they ever thought about it all.
There was a moment of stunned silence. A tentative touch on his arm. "I'm so sorry," she whispered. "I truly had no idea."
Dalton knew that soft tone. That's what happened when a man made an intimate confession, and a woman began to think he could be saved.
He tensed, the muscles in his forearm cording into hard ropes. "Society has forgotten. My family never could. Especially my mother. She's never been back since the death."
Damn it all. Even worse. He couldn't speak about his mother. That would give her even more hope.
He needed to shut his mouth now. And keep it firmly closed.
He was a danger to her.
"Have you thought that visiting the house might chase away the ghosts, instead of drawing them nearer?" Lady Dorothea said softly.
"I've no wish to relive the past."
"That's very sad."
"I don't need your sympathy, Lady Dorothea. I only told you so you'd see why I have no interest in cataloguing the house's contents."
She wrapped the blanket more tightly around her shoulders and curled up on her side of the carriage. "I'll pester you no more, then."
Now he'd angered her. But what else could he do? He had nothing to give her except his protection on this brief journey.
Her breathing grew regular and easy.
She tempted him to uncharacteristic revelations with her trusting eyes and innocently teasing questions.
He couldn't be distracted.
He must be sharp and ready for what lay ahead. Confronting O'Roarke.
Remain focused. Driven.
Lady Dorothea sighed in her sleep, a small sound of release that wound him even tighter.
Obviously, there'd be no sleep for him until this bed became a seat again.
She was tempting but he was strong enough to resist.
Even if she begged him to kiss her. Even if she wound those curls of hers around his shaft and asked him to teach her how to pleasure him through the satin curtain of her hair.
What the devil's wrong with you? Pull yourself together, man.
Her beauty was bone deep and something precious. Not for him to sully.
Not for him to possess.
She was under his protection now.
He would never lose control.
Chapter 7
A touch on his face jolted Dalton awake. In an instant he had his assailant pinned, squirming and helpless beneath him.
"Your Grace." A muffled, indignant female voice. "Your Grace, it's me."
A pause. Several disoriented breaths. A lady in his bed. Daylight.
He never slept the night with a female . . . much less a lady.
Not his bed.
Cramped space.
Carriage.
He rolled off Lady Dorothea, the events of last night crashing through his skull like a left hook from a prizefighter.
By daylight, the situation was even more objectionable. What in holy hell had he been thinking? He never should have agreed to escort her anywhere other than straight back across the square to the countess.
He was more of a danger to her than controlling grandmothers.
Damn. Damn. Damn!
"Well," huffed Lady Dorothea, adjusting her bonnet. "You needn't crush a person."
"You touched me. My reaction was an instinct."
"I was trying to wake you. We've stopped to change horses." She wrinkled her nose. "I smell stable."
Judging by the light, he'd slumbered through at least three well-lit inn yards, a host of stable hands changing horses, new postilions arriving and old ones leaving. It was a disconcerting realization.
How long had she been awake?
He slanted a glance in her direction.
Blunder. Don't stare at her. Don't . . .
Riot of spun-sugar curls. Faint dark smudges under brilliant rainy-sky eyes. Tempting sliver of collarbone visible beneath gray-green patterned silk.
Dalton ripped his gaze away, retied his cravat in a simple knot, and ran a hand through his unruly hair.
Time to make his escape from tumbled and freshly bedded – looking beauties with bold, searching gazes.
"We'll not stay long." He searched for his hat in this rumpled excuse for a hired chariot. "We'll have stopped at a second-rate inn. Could be unsavory characters about."
And he chief among them.
He'd spent far too many hours last night imagining all the depraved things he wanted to do with her. She'd be safer with a highwayman.
She fastened hidden hooks under the embroidered satin of her pale green slim-fitting coat. "I'm that famished." She tied her long dove-gray bonnet ribbons into a pert bow beneath her sharp little chin. "Now then. We need a story, Your Grace. In the event anyone at the inn asks questions. Whose traveling chariot are we riding in?"
"Con rented it from a merchant named Jones, I believe." He located his hat. Even more deflated now. Had he slept on it? "What difference does it make?"
"It means that you're the quite ordinary and humble Mr. Jones. And I'm the estimable Mrs. Jones. Let's see . . ." She fingered her bonnet ribbon, staring out the window at the bustle of activity in the inn yard while he groped around the carriage for his greatcoat.
"Mr. Jones owns a chain of prosperous dry-goods shops. Flour . . . grains . . . oats, that sort of thing. Horses have to eat, you know. Bread must be baked. And we've got three children waiting in Bristol. Their names are . . . Melisande, Mirabelle, and . . . Michaelmas."
Dalton blinked. He hadn't had his morning coffee yet. It was far too early for children. "Michaelmas?"
"She was born on the holy day, poor thing."
"Michaelmas is a girl?" Dalton jerked on his greatcoat and plopped his crushed hat on his head. "We don't need a story." He opened the door and leapt down from the carriage. "Because you're not going to speak to anyone."
Grasping her about the waist, he lifted her to the ground. Not strictly necessary, but expedient. Except that his hands didn't want to relinquish her slender waist. Where was that voluminous gray cloak she'd been wrapped in last night?
There, balled in a corner of the coach. Too wrinkled to wear.
Her eyes lit with a saucy glint. "Would you rather we had a boy, Mr. Jones?"
Dalton snatched his hands away and took a step backward. "I'd rather not have this conversation at all."
Thankfully, everyone else in the stable yard went about their business, saddling horses and hauling feed buckets, too industrious to notice the insurrection being mounted before their eyes.
This was supposed to be a quiet, uneventful journey.
She tilted her head back so she could see him more clearly from under her bonnet brim. "Then pray inform me who you have traveling with you on your carriage bed. Olofsson of the talented feet?"
He slammed the carriage door and marched her toward the inn. "You're decorous Lady Dorothea. I encountered you desperate and alone by the side of the road, the mail coach you so rashly hired having left you behind when you stopped too long at an inn to pester the innkeeper with questions."
Lady Dorothea smiled triumphantly. "You're making up stories, Your Grace. But I like mine better, don't you? Mr. Jones is such a very prosaic and agreeable sort of fellow. Why, he never scolds his darling wife. And he never, ever glowers. Or growls."
Dalton glowered. And then he growled. "I'm begging you to go inside quietly and sip your tea swiftly. Lady Dorothea."
"Oh, do call me Thea, Mr. Jones. I should think with three children I might grant you that liberty."
Dangerous words, those.
Ladies named Dorothea would never speak to tradesmen in a second-rate inn and attract too much attention. But recalcitrant Theas might very well make a scene.
He shook his head. "Not Thea. Not Mrs. Jones," he muttered.
Her eyes narrowed in the watery morning light.
Dalton ignored the warning and hastened her toward the doorway of the inn.
A man in the sober black clothing and white collar of the clergy emerged and walked past them.
"Caro mio! Che bella giornata!" Lady Dorothea shouted, sweeping her hand toward the lowering sky.
The clergyman craned his neck to stare at them.
"What in God's name was that?" Dalton whispered when the clergyman was safely past.
"If I'm not the wife, I must be the mistress. And staid Mr. Jones prefers passionate opera singers," she announced.
There went her fingers again, rubbing the length of bonnet ribbon silk. "I do speak perfect Italian, you know. And my lyric soprano is quite good."
And he was the damned archbishop. "You're as English as Yorkshire pudding. No one will believe you're Italian." He marched her to the door. "Now go inside. Quietly. No more Italian. And no more stories. Do you understand?"
She frowned. "I used to sit in the town square in Florence and observe the conversations. It's all in the hand gestures, you know."
She raised her arm with a dramatic flourish. "I'm Dame Gabrielli, the famous coloratura from Florence." She cocked her hip and placed a fist on the resulting swell.
A stable hand turned, his gaze caught by her unguarded movements and captured by the buttercup curls spilling over her shoulders.