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Regency Christmas Wishes(81)

By:Barbara Metzger


“It does to me,” she said. “And I don’t like her, or it, or you.”

“That,” he said, “is childish.”

“So be it. I want to leave.”

“We will, but for now, we cannot. It is only for five days.”

She turned her back on him.



There were twenty guests seated at the long dinner table in the grand dining room at Fanshawe Manor. Twelve of the guests Pamela, Lady Rexford, knew to be infamous. Thirteen, she thought, considering that her husband would have to be included now. Because Lord Treadwell, husband to a gaunt and raddled blonde of a certain age, had just informed her that his wife had also shared a bed with Jonathan, once upon a time.

Pamela now felt so justified, so right about her previous indignation and refusal to come here, that she wished she could find a lonely, windy moor where she could celebrate her glorious vindication.

“Your rib is some kind of bruiser!” the gentleman at her right side had just said with admiration, before Pamela could introduce herself to him. “A hard goer and a tireless one. At least, so m’wife says.”

“Indeed?” was all she said as she stared cold-eyed at the lady’s husband, taking a page from her own feckless husband’s book of callous noncommittal expressions.

“Right,” he said, and continued chewing whatever he’d pushed into his mouth right after he’d let out his killing words.

He had wide light blue eyes with scant lashes, which gave his round face a perennially surprised look. Otherwise, he looked like any number of other fattish, balding older gentlemen, except that he was sitting at this table, which meant he was both rich and titled. The fact that he liked to sprinkle his conversation with thieves cant, like a lad down from university, gave Pamela some clue to the weight of his mind.

“My rib and yours, y’see,” he went on after he swallowed. “Thick as inkle weavers that whole summer ten years past, the pair of ’em. She says she knew she’d have him in the hay and begging for mercy in an hour, and so she did.”

“And you’re pleased with that?” she exclaimed before she could stop herself.

“I should say!” he said. He pointed a fork at her to give weight to his point. “Not many chaps have a wife who can get ’round a young gent like my lady can. It ain’t all ancient history, neither. Wouldn’t be surprised if she gets him again this very night.”

Pamela sucked in a hard breath. There was now only one question in her mind. Should she get up and leave this place, and her marriage, immediately? Or wait until the company left the dinner table? She couldn’t believe Jonathan would be so lost to propriety that he’d take up with another woman under her very gaze. But she couldn’t believe what this fellow had just said either.

They didn’t look like a raffish crew. The lovely old manor was filled with merry guests. The younger ones were definitely fashionable, the older ones seemed unexceptional. It was true many of the ladies had improbably bright hair and cheeks that obviously owed their blushes to rabbits’ feet and not compliments. But most of the gentlemen seemed more interested in falling on their dinners than any other kind of flesh.

Yet, now this!

“You’re saying you think they’ll . . . do it again this very night?” Pamela found herself asking in a shocked whisper.

“No, didn’t mean to be so literal, milady. Not tonight, a’course,” the fellow said as he crammed in another forkful of food. “But I’ll wager a pony they’ll be at it by dawn.”

Pamela sat and stared at his working jaws.

“Likely, we will,” Jonathan commented from where he was seated at her other side.

She swung her head around and gaped at her husband.

He smiled. “If your lady is up to a dawn ride, I’m her man,” he told the gentleman. “I mean to get back my own this time.”

“Ha!” the fellow said happily. “Prepare to lose another monkey. Neck or nothin’, that’s her. She’ll be up and over any obstacle you name before the word’s out of your mouth. She said she’d fly over the old barn and so she did. Left you panting in the hay and that’s a fact, my lord. Bruising rider, that’s m’girl!”

“Oh . . . rider,” Pamela breathed.

“ ‘Oh, rider,’ indeed,” Jonathan said into her ear as he leaned to whisper to her, the smile in his voice palpable. “The lady is a steeplechase rider, and I don’t doubt she can still beat me at it. But I’m game to try again. Oh, ye of little faith. Honi soit qui mal y’ pense,” he added, and translated, “Evil is who evil thinks, my dear.”