Page 89 of The Ladies Least Likely

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“ O h, the most blessed ill luck the boy had!” Mal’s aunt Beatrice unrolled an apronful of root vegetables onto the broad oaken table where Amaranthe stood, knife in hand. She gave Amaranthe an audacious wink. “We used to call him Mal o’ Misfortune, didn’t we, Littlejohn?”

“Aye, we did,” said her husband in his low, pleasant rumble. “Put that ’un there, lad, and th’other above. I’ve needed a strong back, boy! ’Tis good you’ve come.”

Mal grunted as he moved crates about the storeroom at his uncle’s direction.

Amaranthe tried not to stare. They’d not been at the Green Man above five minutes when Mal had stripped off his gentleman’s frock coat, rolled up his sleeves, and set to the tasks needing done.

Unwilling to be left behind, Amaranthe volunteered to help Beatrice in the kitchen, and therefore had a close view of Mal’s flexing muscles as he hauled and stacked.

The man might live the life of a gentleman, but he had the physique of a laborer, and he moved the largest boxes about as if they were no heavier than her traveling valise.

“Aye, ’tis good to have you.” Beatrice beamed at her nephew. “And in the company of a lady, too!” Again she winked at Amaranthe, who fought the urge to giggle. Beatrice’s warm, expansive personality had set her instantly at ease. “Long past time our Mal took up with a respectable lady.”

“Did you hear that?” Mal called from the storeroom. “Bea thinks you’re respectable.”

Amaranthe laughed and pulled a turnip from the tumbled stack. “I am not a lady,” she admitted. “No more than a poor rector’s daughter from Cornwall.”

“Aye, but will ye take on a bastard, then? What?” Littlejohn protested when Bea pinned him with a stern glare. “I’m one meself, ain’t I?”

“True, that,” Bea said, selecting a pair of onions.

“Thrown on the parish as an orphan, my Littlejohn was, and the workhouse couldn’t afford to feed such a roaring big boy.

But Mr. Green as ran the coaching inn took em in, bless his heart, and here you see em before you, grown to a man.

Well, most o’ one,” she added with a giggle.

Littlejohn lifted the cane he used to walk and shook it in her direction.

Amaranthe tried not to stare, but Littlejohn’s prosthesis was unlike any she’d seen.

Attached to his thigh by a leather cuff, the two wooden pieces, covered in leather, connected with an iron clamp that hinged at the knee and ended in a wooden block carved into the shape of a shoe.

He used a cane for balance but navigated the small stairs leading to the kitchen with ease, and he’d outpaced Bea when they both poured from the inn to greet the post chaise, hearing Mal’s halloo.

“How did you come by the name Littlejohn?” Amaranthe asked. “It puts me in mind of Robin Hood and his Merry Men.”

“That’s what they called me at the workhouse, seeing my size,” Littlejohn said. “Stout heart, that Green. Always taking in strays. All said Bristol had the lowest poor relief rate in the south o’ Britain as Green took on the orphans.”

“They say the same of you, love.” Beatrice buried her knife in an onion with a thwack. “They look em over at the parish workhouse and say aye, this ’un will do as an ostler for Littlejohn, and this one for a chambermaid to help Miz Beatrice.”

“Amaranthe is the same way,” Mal called, hefting a crate of bottles onto a high shelf with ease. “Always taking in strays. You should see her household. And don’t try to walk through a market with her. She stops for every girl selling violets and watercress.”

Amaranthe protested, but Bea smiled and handed her another turnip.

“Then perhaps your luck’s changing at last, me lad.

To think what our boy’s been through, miss!

Losing his ma at such a young age, and she such a fine, sweet sister, the dearest gel you could ever meet.

” She sighed. “You remind me of her, don’t you, with that sweet, quiet air about ye. ”

Amaranthe waited to hear more of Mal’s mother, and Mal paused over another crate full of bottles.

But Beatrice went on with her subject. “Then when the duke comes for him, ready to take the boy in as his own, what does our Mal do but run off to sea, and find out he don’t have his sea legs.

” She sliced the onion with lightning speed and swept the pieces into a bowl.

“Born in Bristol and can’t sail the bay.” Littlejohn laughed and shunted aside a trunk of goods.

“Comes back from Winchester as fine a lad you’ll ever see,” Bea went on, dispatching a second onion with the same efficiency as the first. “And what does he do but fall in love with a girl who won’t have em, because she’s got eyes for this Tew.

And wasn’t Tew the boy you battled with so, the one as always fretted you for being a bastard? ”

“I’ve more than one scar Tew gave me,” Mal said. “Where is he now, I wonder?”

“Took over his father’s brewery, and a justice of the peace besides,” Bea said. “Shifted quite well for himself, didn’t he?”

Mal’s response to this was a violent shove of the crate he held, making the bottles within creak and rattle.

“And now look at ye.” Bea shook her head and dabbed with a corner of her apron at an onion-induced tear in her eye. “Waiting and waiting to be called to the bar, and those poor bairns of your father’s to look after, with no mother to speak of.”

“I’ll be called do I take a clever wife.” Mal moved another crate with an emphatic shove. “More or less guaranteed. But she must be clever, and she must be a wife.”

Bea paused, knife in the air, to bend her gaze on Amaranthe. Littlejohn, leaning on his cane, regarded her as well. She fixed her eyes on the turnip, chopping the slices she’d carefully cut.

“Well, that’s a right fix then!” Bea exclaimed, as if the matter were settled.

“Bad luck’s all right long enough if the end turns it all to good.

Littlejohn, me love, come fetch me down this joint that I want for the stew, will you now?

” And she and her husband moved off to a second storeroom to investigate the hanging meats.

Mal entered the kitchen and moved to the table, stealing a carrot slice from the bowl awaiting the stew pot. Amaranthe smelled his sweat. Delicious. She tried not to look at his bare forearms, lightly dusted with hair, his strong, capable, well-shaped hands.

“What was her name?” she asked despite herself.

He paused in munching. “Who?”

Warmth flushed her face, and she ducked her head. “The girl you fancied.”

“Sally.” He leaned a hip against the table, crowding her. He’d removed his cravat and from the corner of her eye she could see the dip between his collarbones, the skin of his throat, the sheen of sweat. She drew in a deep breath and his scent surrounded her, filling her head, scattering thought.

“Sweet Sally,” he murmured. “I wonder where she is now?”

“Married to Tew, teaching the bairns to brew, and wondering every day if she chose aright,” Amaranthe answered.

“Jealous, are you?” Mal bent close, his nose behind her ear. His breath fanned her neck, and she shivered. His lips hovered a hair’s breadth above her skin.

“Don’t be daft.” She pushed her pile of chopped turnip towards the bowl. “And don’t take liberties,” she added. “Your aunt and uncle will see you.”

“They’ll approve. Didn’t you hear? Bea gave us her blessing.” He pressed his nose into her hair. “Mmm. You smell like turnip.”

She let her knife hang in the air but found she had no wish to push him away. If she turned her head slightly, his lips would brush her cheek. And if she turned just a bit more, her lips would meet his, and?—

She didn’t dare find out what would happen after that.

She laid the knife on the table. Coward .

He’d been a gentleman the three-day trip to Bristol, looking out for both women, arranging for the best rooms at the coaching inns, ordering dinners in private parlors.

Amaranthe found she had nothing to do but make up the bed with the linens she’d brought from home and brush out the duchess’s riding habit each night, removing the dust of the road.

Mal saw to everything, the changing of horses, inspecting the carriage, and when the weather was fine he and Joseph took turns sharing the open back seat with the women.

She and Mal had spent hours together on the road, and he was a far better companion than either Miss Pettigrew, who was cautiously silent and appeared ever on edge, or Joseph, who was preoccupied with Miss Pettigrew.

Mal on the other hand spoke with her long and amusingly of his childhood, his schools and studies, the sights of London that he’d seen.

He’d regaled her with tale after tale of Beatrice and Littlejohn and life at the Green Man, to the point that when the chaise turned into Bristol’s Old Market and the pair poured out to meet them, Amaranthe felt she was being welcomed by friends.

But this was the first time since that moment in her parlor that he’d pressed close or tried to touch her. She held still in fear. What if his touch was as revolting as Reuben’s had been? What if it wasn’t just her cousin but the very touch of a man that she reviled?

“Unless you be wanting to post the banns here and marry from the Green Man, you’ll be treating her like the gentle miss she is, me lad,” Bea warned as she reappeared in the kitchen. “Littlejohn, me love, find our Mal else more to do, won’t you? Idle hands are the devil’s work, I be thinking.”

Amaranthe sighed as he moved away, claiming that he’d meant nothing untoward and a man couldn’t be faulted if he wanted to be near Miss Amaranthe.

His playfulness and his potency left her nervous and jumpy long after he left the room.

The warmth curling through her middle told her she might feel much differently about Mal’s hands on her body than Reuben’s unwanted advances, but fear that she might be wrong kept her from moving toward his embrace. Her fear might be safer than the truth.