Lord of Scoundrels - Loretta Chase [112]
There was a short silence while he digested this unexpected reaction. Then, "Get off me!" he burst out. "Get off me, you cow!"
"That is the wrong way to say it," she said. "The polite way is 'Please get off me, my lady.'"
"Bugger you," he said.
"Oh, dear," she said. "I fear I shall have to take desperate measures."
Releasing his hair, she planted a loud, smacking kiss on the back of his head.
He gave a shocked gasp.
She dropped another noisy kiss on the back of his grimy neck. He tensed. She kissed his dirty cheek.
He let out the breath he'd been holding in a stream of obscenities, and furiously squirmed out from under her. Before he could scramble away, though, she caught the shoulder of his ragged jacket and quickly came to her feet, hauling him up with her.
His shabby boot shot out at her shins, but she dodged, still holding fast.
"Quiet down," she said in her best Obedience or Death tones, giving him a shake for good measure. "Try kicking me again and I shall kick back— and I won't miss, either."
"Piss on you!" he cried. He made a violent effort to wrench away, but Jessica had a firm grip, not to mention plenty of practice with squirming children.
"Let me go, you stupid sow!" he shrieked. "Let me go! Let me go!" He was pulling and twisting frantically. But she grasped one scrawny arm and managed to draw him back firmly against her and wrap her arms about him.
The squirming stopped, but the outraged howls did not.
It occurred to Jessica that he was truly alarmed, yet she could not believe he was afraid of her.
His cries were growing more desperate when the answer appeared.
Phelps came round a turn in the bridle path with a woman in tow. The child broke off midscream and froze.
The woman was Charity Graves.
* * *
It was the boy's mother who had been chasing him this time and, unlike the hapless Athcourt villagers, she had a very good idea what to do with him. For starters, she would beat him within an inch of his life, she announced.
He'd run away a fortnight ago, and Charity claimed she'd been looking for him everywhere. Finally, she'd ventured to Athton— though she knew it was as much as her life was worth to come within ten miles of His Lordship, she said. She'd come as far as the Whistling Ghost when Tom Hamby and Jem Furse came running out, leading a dozen other angry men, who quickly surrounded her.
"And they give— gave— me an earful," Charity said, bending a threatening look upon her son.
Jessica no longer had him by the collar. At his mother's appearance, the boy had grabbed her hand. He was gripping it hard now. Except for the fierce pressure of that little hand, he was immobile, his body rigid, his dark eyes riveted upon his mother.
"Everyone in Dartmoor knows what he's been up to," Jessica said. "You cannot expect me to believe you heard nothing. Where were you, in Constantinople?"
"I'm a working woman," said Charity, tossing her head. "I can't be watching him every second, and I got no nanny to do it for me, neither. I sent him to school, didn't I? But Schoolmaster couldn't make him mind, could he? And how am I to do it, I ask you, when the boy bolts on me and I don't know where he's keeping himself?"
Jessica doubted that Charity cared where the boy was keeping himself, until she'd heard his refuge was Athcourt's park. If His Lordship found out the "guttersnipe" was hiding out in the second marquess's ornate, immaculately maintained summerhouse, there would be hell to pay, and Charity knew it.
Even now, she was not so boldly defiant as she pretended. Her green glance skittered away from time to time to take in their leafy surroundings, as though she expected Dain to explode through the trees at any moment.
Uneasy she was, yet she did not seem in any great hurry to be gone, either. Though Jessica could not guess what exactly was going through the woman's mind, it was clear enough that she was sizing up the Marchioness of Dain and adjusting her approach accordingly. Having quickly perceived that the threats