A Rake's Midnight Kiss

“If you insist.” The vicar didn’t hide his disappointment.

“Genevieve, show Mr. Evans out,” Mrs. Warren said.

Flushing with chagrin, Genevieve put down her tea. “Very well. Mr. Evans?”

“Miss Barrett.” He took her arm as she stood.

She stiffened beneath his touch and the instant they’d passed through the door, she jerked free. “It’s only three steps.”

Genevieve abhorred this fluster. She’d always considered herself above female foibles; the thrill at spying a handsome man, the primping and preening. Yet even now, she was painfully conscious that she’d spilled ink on her sleeve and her hair hadn’t seen a comb since this morning. Next to Mr. Evans’s perfect tailoring, she felt shabby and disheveled and inadequate.

She shut the door to keep Hecuba in the parlor. Mr. Evans stopped, blast him, in the flagstoned hall. The space had never felt so small. He turned to her, puzzlement darkening his features. “Why don’t you like me, Miss Barrett?”

She couldn’t help herself. She laughed. “Hasn’t anyone ever disliked you?”

He had the grace to look slightly shamefaced. “If I say no, I’ll sound like a complete ass.”

“Although nobody ever has disliked you, have they?”

He shrugged. “Generally not young ladies.”

Her lips quirked with wry agreement. “I can imagine.”

He stepped closer. With difficulty she held her ground, although every feminine instinct screamed to run. “I’d like us to be friends.”

Now it was her turn to be puzzled. “Why?”

“Your father hasn’t told you?”

A chill presentiment of disaster oozed down her spine. “Told me what?”

“The vicar has invited me to study with him. I’m moving out of Leighton Court tomorrow and coming here.”

“Oh, no.” Genevieve only realized she’d spoken aloud when humor turned his face to brilliance.

“Tell me what you really think.”

No other man made her blush like this or provoked her to say such idiotic things. And their acquaintance only started. The idea of sharing the same roof made her stomach cramp with dismay. Still, she’d been appallingly rude and to give him credit, he’d taken it in good spirit. “I’m sorry.”

Mr. Evans collected his hat from the stand. “Perhaps you’ll like me once we’re better acquainted.”

And perhaps cows might sing Rossini. But she kept that thought to herself. Was she learning discretion? She’d need to if Mr. Evans became her houseguest. She consigned her father to perdition, not for the first time, for his impetuousness. But he was the master of the house and he expected his womenfolk to obey his whims. The task that currently engaged her became more urgent with every day.

“How long are you staying?” she asked stiffly.

Something about Mr. Evans’s smile made her step back. She’d feel less foolish if she could identify one particular element in his manner that unnerved her. Well, until he smiled at her the way he smiled now. He looked like a hungry tiger contemplating a lamb chop. Trepidation shivered along her veins and her heart thumped chaotically against her ribs.

“As long as it takes,” he said softly. His eyelids lowered, lending him a disconcertingly saturnine air. For most of the evening, he’d played the perfect guest. But in the space of a second, he transformed into a man who clearly intended seduction.

She told herself she let the fright she’d suffered from the burglary turn her into a nervous wreck. Surely she mistook him. A dull bluestocking past first youth couldn’t attract this Adonis.

“Stop flirting,” she said firmly. “You’re only doing it because there isn’t another woman here.”

This time he laughed out loud. The sound was attractive. Open. Joyful. Genuine. “You defeat me, Miss Barrett. How am I to work my wiles when you undo me at every turn?”

She didn’t smile back, although something in his unabashed delight tugged at her heart. “I don’t want you to work your wiles, Mr. Evans.”

“Your aunt likes me.”

Genevieve’s huff approached a snort. “My aunt likes any man who’s breathing and unmarried.”

Curse him, he shouldn’t laugh again. Her glare did nothing to quell his amusement. “The longer we’re alone, the keener she’ll be to see your ring on my finger.”

He slouched against the newel post and regarded her as if she provided marvelous entertainment. She was sure she did. He probably hadn’t toyed with such an awkward female since his first dance lessons. Among the reasons he set her bristling like an angry cat was that she felt irredeemably gauche in his presence.

“You mention marriage with disdain worthy of a rake,” he said drily.

“You’d know.”

He arched one eyebrow. “I’m merely a country gentleman pursuing intellectual interests.”

“Not even I’m green enough to believe that.”

“Ah,” he said softly. “So it’s not that you don’t like me, it’s that you don’t trust me.”

She retreated until she collided with the wall. For one frantic moment, she wished she’d spent fewer nights over her books and more at the local assemblies. She was completely out of her depth with this urbane man. “Can’t it be both?”

He stepped closer. “Is it?”

She stared at him, her heart racing. She’d never been kissed. Until this moment, she hadn’t marked the lack. Right now, she had a horrible feeling that her unkissed days were numbered. Might perhaps end this second. She wondered why the prospect left her excited rather than outraged. She should itch to slap this Lothario’s face.

“Please go.” She cursed her husky tone. “Aunt Lucy will post the banns if I’m not back in the library within the next five minutes.”

“You’re not really at your last prayers, are you?”

Color flooded her cheeks and she spoke sharply. “I’m not praying at all. I’m not interested in marriage.”

“Miss Barrett, you shock me.”

She frowned, then realized he’d misunderstood. Deliberately. “I’m a scholar, not a courtesan,” she snapped.

Did he lean a fraction closer? Or did her imagination play tricks? Heaven help her. He was moving into the vicarage. Eons of this torment stretched ahead. How on earth would she survive?

“Pity.” He straightened and set his hat at a jaunty angle. “Until tomorrow, Miss Barrett.”

And the day after that, she thought despairingly. Her father welcomed a wolf into the sheepfold.

She drew herself up, reminding herself that she was clever and strong and had never fallen victim to a man’s stratagems. Not that the distant adoration she’d incited in her father’s previous students compared.

She spoke with commendable conviction. “I can’t see what amusement you’ll find with a country vicar and his ape-leader of a daughter.”

Did she mistake the sudden fire in his eyes? “I’ll let you know if I’m bored.”

“What do you want, Mr. Evans?” she asked dazedly.

He stepped back and bowed with an aplomb she envied. She must have mistaken that brief, intense flash of sexual awareness. A deep breath loosened the invisible band around her chest.

“Miss Barrett, once I thought I knew. But now? Now, the game has changed.” He touched his hat with a confidence that reminded her why he irked her. “Good evening.”

He lifted a candle with a gesture that stirred memory. Somewhere, sometime recently she’d watched a man like this lighting a candle in a shadowy room. But in her agitation, she couldn’t tease any sense from the scrap of recollection.

“Good evening, Mr. Evans.”

She wished she didn’t sound so breathless. Dear Lord, he hadn’t touched her, hadn’t come within a foot of her. Yet she dithered like a besotted milkmaid. She needed to rush upstairs and bury herself in something dry and dull like the local shire rolls. Something as dull as she’d promised Mr. Evans his stay at the vicarage would prove.

Instead she lingered in the hall after he left. She didn’t shift until she heard his carriage rattle away over the cobblestones.

Chapter Five

Once Richard moved into the cramped back bedroom, his visions of lazy days flirting with Genevieve Barrett evaporated under the reality of vicarage life. Dr. Barrett was overjoyed to have an assistant who paid generously for the privilege, and even more welcome, an audience for his endless theorizing. Lucy Warren provided more agreeable company and was remarkably confiding about her niece. But Richard was staying ostensibly to widen his knowledge of all things Middle Ages, so he couldn’t devote too much time to the aunt without rousing suspicions about his historical interests. Lord Neville visited every day and proved an inconvenient presence, dogging Richard’s footsteps as if fearing for the church plate.

While his acquaintance, congenial or not, developed with the vicarage’s other denizens, Miss Barrett proved elusive. As did any chance to worm the Harmsworth Jewel away from her. If Richard hadn’t seen the jewel the night he’d broken in, he’d begin to doubt the artifact was in the house. Nobody, including Miss Barrett, mentioned it.

After three frustrating days meeting her only at meals, not to mention learning more than he’d ever wanted to know about the Princes in the Tower, Richard resorted to drastic measures.

Quietly he opened the door to the small upstairs room where he’d first encountered Genevieve. It was so early, the sky was dark. In Town, he often saw the dawn, but as the end of a night’s entertainment, not the start of a day’s scholarship. Across the faded carpet, candlelight formed a circle around the woman bent writing over the desk.

His breath caught as he stood transfixed, astonished anew at her beauty. She sat slightly turned away, revealing her profile. Straight, autocratic nose; determined chin; lashes lowered against high cheekbones as she concentrated too deeply to notice her observer. The sleeve of her faded dimity dress drooped from her shoulder, revealing the strap of her shift. A striped pinafore protected the front of her gown.

In Richard’s glittering world, female beauty was no rarity. But this dauntingly clever vicar’s daughter was the loveliest woman he’d ever seen.

He suffered a momentary pang that he didn’t pursue her as his real self. But then, Genevieve would despise the shallow Sir Richard Harmsworth. Hell, she didn’t much like Christopher Evans.

Without Sirius’s interruption, he might have watched forever, but he must have left his bedroom door along the corridor ajar. Sirius squeezed past him now and trotted up to the desk.

“Hello. Where did you come from?” Genevieve spoke with a warmth she’d never directed at Richard, damn it. When she glanced up, she started. Then her closed expression felt like a winter wind. To his regret, she tugged her sleeve over her pale shoulder. “Mr. Evans.”

“Miss Barrett.” At this hour, he couldn’t help thinking that they’d both be better off in bed. His bed. Not that wanting did much good. Lusting after a chaste woman promised only frustration.

“You surprised me.”

“Are your nerves on edge?”

She shrugged. “I’m jumpy after the break-in.”

Guilt stabbed him. She’d been so indomitable facing down his burglar self, it hadn’t occurred to him that she’d been genuinely frightened.

Masking her vulnerability, she extended a hand to scratch Sirius behind the ears. Ridiculous to be jealous of a dog, but Richard was.

“What are you doing awake?” she asked.

To confirm the uncivilized hour, a lark burst into a torrent of silvery song outside. He decided to be honest. Well, as honest as a man sporting a false name could be. “You’re avoiding me.”

She didn’t meet his eyes. “Nonsense.”

“I moved in three days ago and we’ve hardly exchanged a word since.”

“You’re here to work with my father.” Her dry tone indicated that she questioned his dedication to scholarship. Clever girl. With a doggy groan, Sirius stretched out beneath the windowsill.

“You’re more decorative.”

She pursed her lips. The expression didn’t look forbidding. It looked like she meant to kiss him. The thought lit the cool dawn to flame.

Gently he closed the door and stepped into the bookcase-lined room. Books and papers littered every flat surface. The shambles was endearing. The rest of the house was dauntingly ordered. When he’d broken in, he hadn’t noted his surroundings. The woman had occupied his attention. The woman and the Harmsworth Jewel.

She set down her pen. “I need to help Dorcas with breakfast.”

He didn’t shift. “Dorcas is still enjoying the sleep of the just.”

“We’ll wake everyone if we talk here.”

“I’ll keep my voice down.” The vicarage was old. Seventeenth century, he guessed. The walls and doors were so thick, no sound penetrated. After he’d locked Genevieve in, he’d barely heard her protests.

“It’s inappropriate for us to be alone.” She jerked to her feet, upsetting the horn cup of water on the desk. “Bother!”

He surged forward to hold her wrist. Her skin was warm and he caught a drift of her morning scent. Flowers and woman. “Let me.”

“No, I’ll fix it.” Ink-stained fingers fluttered in protest without making contact.

When he released her, he heard her relieved exhalation. Her eyes fixed upon a gold object on the crowded desk. It proved how distracting she was that he only now realized that, as on the first night, the Harmsworth Jewel sat for the plucking, if he was so bold.

He wasn’t so bold.

“I hope the water hasn’t damaged anything.” Drawing his handkerchief from his coat, he mopped up the spillage. Thank goodness, the cup had been nearly empty.

“Only some notes I’m working on.” With little ceremony, Genevieve pushed him out of the way and grabbed a crumpled cloth from the floor. Carefully she sponged the sheet she’d been writing on. The ink blotched and she tossed the cloth into a corner with a sigh.

With every moment, the day brightened. Soon he’d have no excuse to detain her. Richard wondered, not for the first time, if he’d find her so fascinating if she didn’t prickle with hostility. Then he remembered her serene beauty in the candlelight. She’d attract him whatever she did. Something about her made him feel alive. Was it just that she saw him as a man, not as the notorious Harmsworth bastard? Or was it something more?

He looked around with a deliberately casual air. “What do you do in here?”

She cast him a suspicious look as he lifted a pile of papers from the desk and perched his hip on the space. “What do you care?”

He cared more than she imagined. In his peripheral vision, the Harmsworth Jewel shone red, blue, and gold. Strategy suggested an oblique approach to his real interest. His real interests. Genevieve’s lure became at least as powerful as the family relic’s.

He met her challenge with a level stare. “Why so secretive?”

She slumped into her chair and regarded the soaked page with a disgruntled expression. “Do you like working with my father?”

“Yes,” he said, not altogether truthfully. He enjoyed reviving his rusty Latin and Greek, but the vicar wasn’t the intellectual powerhouse reputation indicated. Richard was yet to glimpse the brilliance that illuminated the articles. “I thought you acted as his assistant.”

“I do.” An unreadable expression crossed her lovely face.

He’d caught vague hints of an estrangement between the vicar and his daughter, but now he was sure of it. Genevieve was yet to join one of his sessions with Dr. Barrett. That suddenly struck him as more significant than her merely avoiding a guest’s company.

Idly he lifted a page covered with writing. She had a strong, almost masculine hand.

“Put that down!” She rushed around the desk and snatched uselessly at the paper.

“Indulge me.” He stepped sideways and started to read, then frowned. He put down that page and reached around her for the next. After a few minutes, he replaced the pages and lifted his head to stare at her in shock. “It’s you.”

She scowled, panting with annoyance at his high-handed behavior. He rather liked that she made no attempt to charm him. Women always strove to turn him up sweet, however disreputable his birth. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“Dr. Barrett isn’t the brilliant mind here. His daughter is. You write the articles.”

Genevieve paled and backed against the desk. Her hand clenched on her ruined manuscript, crushing the damp paper into a ball. “Don’t be absurd. I’m a mere woman.”

He laughed, genuinely delighted. “That’s the first coy thing I’ve heard you say.”

Her jaw set in a mutinous line. “Any article written in this house is published under my father’s name.”

“It’s all your work.” He watched her struggle to deny the truth. But the lightning intelligence and sharp perception demonstrated in the articles, and lacking in the vicar, were clear from the first line. “Come, there’s no point nay-saying. I know you’re the scholar here.”

Briefly he wondered whether he could turn this knowledge against her, use it to obtain the jewel. Would she sell him the heirloom in return for his silence on her authorship? He tucked the thought away to consider later, even as he recognized his reluctance to resort to blackmail. Ridiculous when the whole purpose of this masquerade was to winkle out the chit’s secrets.

“I have no qualifications.”

“Apart from a brain the size of St. Paul’s. And a lifetime in scholarly circles.” Still, he was impressed at what she’d achieved without formal education. Ignoring her resistance, he lifted the hand curled around the soggy paper and placed a kiss across her knuckles. For once he wasn’t being seductive. “Deny the fact until Christmas, but it won’t do any good. I’m in awe, Miss Barrett.”

She cast him an uncertain glance under her lashes. Another woman might mean flirtation, but he’d concluded that Genevieve Barrett had never learned the wiles of her worldly sisters.

When he let her go, she began to shred the paper, her hands working nervously in front of her extravagantly pocketed pinafore. “You can’t share your suspicions. They could destroy my father’s reputation.”

After lifting some books off the seat, he moved a chair from the wall to the desk. Dust flew and he sneezed. Sirius started up in surprise from where he lay in sleepy contentment. Sitting, Richard surveyed her with unfettered admiration. “Your brilliance should receive acknowledgement.”

Her voice expressionless, she retreated to sit behind the desk. “Papa offered to credit me as coauthor after I turned twenty-one, but that is yet to eventuate.”

Genevieve’s careful neutrality indicated that this was a sore point. No wonder she resented her father. As a man familiar with parental betrayal, Richard felt for her. “Surely people suspect.”

“There’s no reason they should.” In her eyes, he read displeasure at how quickly he’d uncovered her secret.

“I knew the moment I read that first page.”

“A lucky guess.”

“Perhaps we’re particularly attuned, Miss Barrett.”

Her expression didn’t lighten. “Stop flirting. This is serious.”

He laughed softly and leaned back in his chair. “Believe me, flirting is a serious business.” He sobered. “Fairbrother must have an inkling.”

Lord Neville strove to make Richard feel like an interloper. Richard had immediately recognized that the man protected his territory. The question was—what was his territory? Scholarly pursuits? The vicar? The vicar’s dangerously unsuspecting daughter? Or all three?

A cynical light entered Genevieve’s eyes. “Lord Neville’s interest is his collection, not scholarship for its own sake.”

An interesting opinion. And one that wouldn’t please his overbearing lordship, Richard thought with unworthy satisfaction. “You can’t hide in your father’s shadow forever.”

The tension drained from her shoulders and she answered with unexpected readiness. Perhaps the relief of sharing the truth with someone, even his unworthy self, encouraged confidences. “I’m publishing an article about the Harmsworth Jewel under my own name.”

Holy God above. No wonder she didn’t want to sell the artifact. He barely stopped himself choking with appalled astonishment.

He struggled to act as if this revelation incited only mild curiosity. “What?”

“That’s it.” She pointed at the enamel and gold object, as if he needed help locating it. “My findings should set the scholarly world abuzz. Or at least that section of the scholarly world interested in the Anglo-Saxons.” Her tone turned wry as she acknowledged that this esoteric field rarely impinged on the wider public.

She lifted the jewel, her hands sure, almost careless. His belly clenched with conflicting impulses. The urge to grab the girl. The urge to grab the jewel.

“A wonderful old lady bequeathed it to me. She was a disciple of Mary Wollstonecraft and until you, the only person to guess that I wrote most of Papa’s published works. It’s a family heirloom.”

Damn it, it certainly was. And not one that Amelia, Viscountess Bellfield, had any business handing on. Richard gritted his teeth against informing Genevieve that the jewel belonged to him.

“She must have been fond of you.” He hoped to hell his voice didn’t sound as strangled to Genevieve as in his ears. Patience, he reminded himself, patience. He’d get the jewel off her in good time.

“I loved her dearly too.” Genevieve’s admiration for Lady Bellfield was audible. “She was a noted bluestocking and owned an impressive collection of books and antiquities.”

“One would think she’d keep something so valuable in the family.”

“She’d had a falling out with the Harmsworths. She particularly disliked the current baronet. Some family scandal made him unfit to hold the title.”

Despite himself, Richard winced. The hell of it was that the disgrace never died. Call him a slow learner, but he now understood that it never would, whoever possessed the Harmsworth Jewel. Which made him no less determined to restore the trinket to Polliton Place, the family seat in Norfolk. It belonged to the head of the Harmsworth family. And, bastardy or no, that was him.

He’d always liked Great Aunt Amelia, for all her fearsome reputation. A shock to discover that because he was a bastard, she couldn’t abide him. Old anger tightened his gut. Anger and shame.

Luckily Genevieve studied the jewel, not his reactions. “That was a condition of inheriting. Under no circumstances was Lady Bellfield’s great-nephew Richard Harmsworth to obtain the jewel.”

God rot Great Aunt Amelia for an interfering old witch.

“I doubt the executors would prosecute if you sold it.” Richard tried to sound disingenuous. Genevieve cast him a questioning glance that indicated he’d failed. Hardly surprising. Genuine innocence had been a casualty of childhood bullying. “I imagine you’d get a good price.”

“Strange that you say that. A few months ago, Sir Richard discovered I had the jewel. He’s pestering me to sell.”

“At a bargain price?” He’d offered her a fortune. He waited to hear if any amount might change her mind. At least he now understood why his agents had failed. Part of him admired Genevieve’s loyalty to Aunt Amelia, while another part cursed this complication.

“Money seemed no object. Odd when Lady Bellfield indicated Sir Richard wasn’t interested in family history.”

Little do you know, sweetheart. “The jewel is very beautiful.”

“And reputedly powerful. There’s a myth that Alfred the Great presented it to a Harmsworth ancestor for foiling a Viking assassination. The jewel passed from Harmsworth father to son, confirming the heir’s right to inherit. Such tales abound in old families. That’s one fascinating element of my research.”

“Perhaps you should sell.” A critical light in his eyes, he surveyed the shabby room. “Think what you could do.”

She shrugged. “I owe Lady Bellfield better return for her generosity.”