The Wild Rose: A Tapestry of Love Romance by Rebecca Ward

Author:Rebecca Ward [Ward, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: White Glove
Published: 2014-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

It was past three in the morning, but Rosamund lay wide awake in her bed. Lucy and Anemone had long since returned from their evening at Lady Darcey’s, the house was shut and barred against thieves, and the servants had gone to bed.

Though she was usually a sound sleeper, Rosamund was kept awake by a tangle of disturbing images. There was the shock of seeing Lord Braden push that poor woman into the gutter. There was the look Chief Storm Cloud had given her when he talked about returning to Canada. And then, there was Hawkley.

Rosamund turned over on her pillow, but this did not keep her from recalling the taste and feel of the earl’s lips. And she remembered how, after that passionate kiss that had left her universe reeling, he had simply excused his behavior as excess fatigue.

She did not understand the earl. He kept her off balance. He infuriated her. Yet he could also make her laugh, and he had nursed Ned Wilkes as gently and as compassionately as Tall Reed might have done. Sometimes he looked at her intently—not as Storm Cloud had done tonight but in a way that caused her knees to feel weak—but that was probably all for Bevan’s sake. She could well imagine what her brother had said about her in his letter.

Rosamund sat bolt upright in bed, picked up her pillow, and hurled it across the room. It skittered against the window and landed with a plop, and she began to laugh . “What a fool I am,” she said ruefully. “Now I’ll have to get out of bed and fetch my pillow.”

She padded across the cold floor and bent to retrieve her pillow. As she did so, she glanced idly out of the window and was startled to see a man standing by the steps of the house. She could not see his face because it was so dark and because he was well muffled into a hat and cloak, but she sensed that he was watching the house.

Here was a thief, or perhaps a glassman or snakesman employed by robbers to break into Lucy’s house. Rosamund gave the bellpull a hard yank, and, pulling on her robe as she went, hastened to knock on Lucy’s door.

Lucy received the news with the fortitude of a woman who had shot a maddened grizzly and had dealt summarily with drunk and disorderly fur traders, truculent Iroquois, and poisonous snakes. Nightcap aquiver, she jumped out of bed, shoved her feet into stout shoes, and demanded, “You’ve roused the servants, Rosa? Good! Let’s go get that skunk.”

Footsteps pounded on the stairs as the footmen, struggling to do up their shirt buttons as they came, rushed up the stairs. Bleak, his superior air for once dissipated by alarm, followed on their heels, and behind these stalwarts scurried the Sample ladies’ abigails, Nancy, the housemaid, parlormaid, cook, housekeeper, and the little potboy, who was still in his nightshirt.

“Oh, what is happening?” Mrs. Devinter’s door had popped open to disclose that lady swathed in a voluminous night robe and cap.

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