Rules for a Rogue Read online

  Croft looked on indulgently as his wife bent to dig in her satchel once again. When she sat up, the lady offered Kit a slim cloth-bound book.

  “You might consider something more like this,” she suggested.

  “Another etiquette book?” The drum is his head beat with renewed fervor.

  “Oh no, sir. Much more. My ladies’ book club has chosen Miss Gilroy’s guide this month, and it is causing quite a stir in the London papers. The notions are modern but sensible. All Englishwomen know what they mustn’t do. Etiquette has been drilled in for generations. Why not a book that inspires young ladies rather than restricts them?”

  Mrs. Croft spoke so passionately, her cheeks flamed with color and little sparks flared in her eyes. Even her husband looked taken aback.

  Caught up in the lady’s oration, Kit hadn’t glanced down at the book she fervently recommended. When he did, he found the title familiar. Miss Gilroy’s Guidelines for Young Ladies. The same volume he’d seen at Phee’s.

  “May I borrow this?” Suddenly he was curious what all the fuss was about.

  Mrs. Croft bit her lower lip. “I wouldn’t wish to part with my only copy, sir.”

  “I’ll buy you another, Nessa,” Mr. Croft reassured, “as soon as we’re back in London.”

  “Very well.” Even as she bobbed her head in agreement, the lady kept her gaze fixed on Miss Gilroy’s book. “Does this mean you’d consider publishing something new and keeping your father’s business?”

  “No.” Bills, suppliers, correspondence, ledger books—the sheer humdrum monotony of business nonsense made Kit shiver. But Mrs. Croft’s question reminded him how he should be spending his time. Namely, working on a play for Fleet and selling Ruthven Publishing. “But if you and Mr. Croft bought the concern, you could publish whatever you liked.”

  The older man tugged thoughtfully at his beard. “Perhaps we can meet again once you’ve seen to the company’s finances.”

  Mrs. Croft let out a little huff of protest, but she was gracious as they took their leave, even if she did cast one last longing glance back at Miss Gilroy’s book.

  Kit considered offering her one of his father’s books to read on their train journey back to London, but the lady had done nothing to deserve that sort of torture.

  He flipped Miss Gilroy’s Guidelines in his hand after the Crofts departed. Whoever bought Ruthven’s, would they publish anything people relished, rather than churning out tomes like his father’s? The Ruthven Rules was the sort of book everyone was expected to own, but no one cared to read.

  He shook his head. Not my concern.

  Returning to his father’s desk, he searched out a sheet of foolscap and began noting ideas for his play. Notions about characters and conflict fought through the thumping at his temples and the faint scent of flowers still clinging to his skin. His pen strayed to the paper’s margin, and he found himself scribbling Phee’s name.

  Was she truly going to give herself to that blustering fool Dunstan?

  Why did he bloody care?

  I’m the fool. But he was right on one count. He’d been wise to keep away from Briar Heath. Absence had allowed him to forget the velvet softness of her skin; kept him ignorant about an odious aristocrat’s proposal.

  He glanced out the window and snorted in disgust.

  Rolling green fields. Orderly hedgerows. A few fluffy sheep in a field across the way. Briar Heath looked so damned bucolic. Yet no place in England was so dangerous to his peace of mind.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Two days after her confrontation with Kit at the stream, Phee stood on the Ruthven’s doorstep. She patted the simple knot at the back of her head, tugged down her bodice, and smoothed the fabric of her skirt. One deep breath, two hard swallows, and she raised a hand to lift the door knocker. And held it aloft, biting her lip.

  She was in no position to turn down an opportunity to earn tuition fees, but Sophia’s note asking Phee to resume Clarissa’s art lessons seemed a mixed blessing. Phee assumed the tutoring sessions would be postponed during the mourning period. Why start up again so quickly? And why here? She’d never been invited to tutor the girl at the Ruthven home. The prospect seemed sufficiently unappealing when Leopold Ruthven ruled his household like a tyrant, but now Kit lurked somewhere behind the house’s tall oak doors.

  The minute she dropped the brass lion’s head knocker, she braced herself for another sight of him.

  When would he return to London? Forgetting the man had been difficult when he was twenty miles away. Now, when she might encounter him around every corner—

  “Are you here to see Mr. Ruthven, miss?” A housemaid interrupted her woolgathering.

  “No.” Definitely not. “Miss Sophia Ruthven, please.”

  “Right this way, miss.” The mobcapped girl led her into the same drawing room where she’d met Sophia days before to offer condolences.

  Phee took a chair by the window and looked out onto the leaf-strewn field beyond, trying not to think about where Kit might be in the large rambling house. Trying not to imagine she could smell his spice and forest scent in the air. She began tapping her heel against the carpet, then pressed a hand to her knee to force herself to stop.

  “You came!” Clarissa rushed into the parlor, setting glass knickknacks rattling, and flounced onto the settee. “I’m so relieved. The house is nefariously quiet.”

  Phee pressed her lips together to stave off a grin. Clarissa’s fondness for adverbs was almost as charming as the girl’s tendency to add decorative flourishes to everything—her clothing, her artwork, even her sentences. Today she’d fashioned crepe paper violets and pinned them to the neckline of her black mourning dress. One had been stuffed into a blonde curl over her ear too.

  “All my paints and brushes are upstairs in the nursery. Shall we go?”

  As soon as Phee nodded, Clarissa took her by the hand and led her toward the house’s main staircase.

  “You might think a nursery sounds egregiously childish.” Kit’s sister turned back as she ascended the stairs. “But I assure you I’ve decorated it liberally with my paintings. Especially the ones you praised, Miss Marsden.”

  The young lady hadn’t lied. The nursery, a room on the house’s top floor, featured a vaulted ceiling festooned with papier-mâché birds and a garland she’d fashioned from buttons, bits of ribbon, and scraps of lace, stringing the whole from one gaslight sconce to the next around the room. Her art covered most of the simple striped wallpaper, as colorful and vibrant as Clarissa’s personality.

  “You were going to teach me how to draw hands next. It will prove exorbitantly helpful when I finish the piece I’m working on.”

  “What is it?” A largish canvas sat on an easel in the corner of the room, the whole of it draped in a paint-smeared cloth.

  Clarissa chewed her thumbnail. “May I show you after our lesson?”

  “Of course.”

  After taking seats at a long wooden table in the center of the room where pencils, brushes, and paints had been set out, it didn’t take them long to set to work. What seemed a short time later, Phee checked her watch fob and found that nearly an hour had passed.

  “We can ring for tea.” Clarissa kept her blonde head bent over the table, busily shading her drawing of Phee’s hand in various poses.

  “I should get back home.” Phee stood and placed her palms on the small of her back to stretch. Juliet had gone for her first Latin lesson with the vicar, and she wanted to hear how it had gone. No doubt her sister had asked to start by learning to pronounce the names of Latin numbers.

  “I thought we’d invite my brother up first.”

  “Why?” Phee squeaked out the word and worked to temper the panicky flutter in her throat. An hour in the house and not a single sight of him. She’d convinced herself he might be away from home or otherwise occupied. “I’m sure that’s not necessary.”

  “But I thought he could model for us.”

  Images of Kit in various modeling poses
flitted through Phee’s mind. Her breath caught in her throat, and she shook her head to push the notion away. “I don’t think Mr. Ruthven . . . ” Yes, call him by his father’s name. Distance. That’s what she needed. Unfortunately, she was standing inside the man’s house.

  “You could show me how to sketch a gentleman’s hand,” Clarissa continued. “They must be different from ladies’ hands.”

  “Not at all. They are precisely the same.” Now she was clinging to adverbs. “Exactly. Some gentlemen’s hands might be larger than a lady’s, but the basic shapes are the same. We needn’t trouble your brother.”

  Though her excuse satisfied Clarissa, who went back to work on her drawing, Phee suddenly found it impossible to think of anything but the size and shape of Kit’s hands.

  She hadn’t told Clarissa the entire truth. Some men’s hands were different. Kit’s weren’t elegant and pale but large and broad-fingered. From the time he’d turned eighteen, growing inches taller seemingly overnight, everything about him had been fashioned on a grander scale. Kit’s hands matched his long legs, broad chest, and shoulders as wide as a plank. The man was not made with the same mold as average men.

  “Shall I come back on the same day next week?” To distract herself, Phee began tidying the pencils, smudging sticks, and rubber erasers they’d used during the lesson.

  “Could you return tomorrow?” Clarissa set her drawing aside and leaned over the table, whispering, “Sophia says we can’t go out, and I’m beginning to feel dreadfully trapped.”

  Phee sympathized. Mourning traditions were challenging for young ladies as spirited as Clarissa Ruthven.

  “I’ll return early next week. We can take a walk in the garden and start on landscape painting. Will that do?”

  “Wonderfully.” The girl beamed. Then her eyes bulged as her smile widened. “Kit! How did you know we wished for you to come up?”

  A tickle began at the back of Phee’s neck, and she felt as much as heard Kit approaching from behind as he entered the room.

  “My ears were burning,” he teased as he drew up next to Phee. “I didn’t realize you’d come for a visit, Ophelia.”

  It wasn’t entirely proper for him to use her first name. Neither of his sisters knew how close he and Phee had been to becoming lovers in those months before he left for London.

  “Miss Ruthven invited me to come and give Clarissa her art lesson.” She spared him one quick glance out of courtesy, focusing on his chin, the part of his body at her eye level. She tried not to notice that he was casually dressed, or that his shirt buttons were undone down to the hollow at the base of his throat.

  “You did promise to show me your art, Clary.” He pointed to the canvas on the easel. “What do you have under there?”

  Clarissa sprang toward the easel, standing with her back to it as if fully prepared to defend it from marauders. “You can’t see it. Either of you. Not yet.”

  “Fair enough.” He skimmed his gaze around the room in a wide arc, pivoting on his heels, pausing to stare at Phee until the tickle at her nape spread down her back and arms and the length of her legs. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught him flashing a smile, apparently pleased with how thoroughly he unsettled her.

  “Perhaps you can guide me, Miss Marsden.”

  “Me?”

  “Show me what you’ve taught my sister.” He shifted his gaze from the drawings and paintings lining the walls to Phee. “If you’re such a good teacher, perhaps I should take some lessons.”

  She’d never glared at the brother of a student before, but none had ever deserved it as much as Kit Ruthven.

  After taking a deep breath, Phee approached the wall at the back of the room. “We started with basic shapes.” She pointed to a few of the first drawings Clarissa had produced under her tutelage. “Then moved on to still life. Objects one might find around the home.”

  Kit stepped toward a particular sketch and swept his finger against the paper’s surface. He cast Phee a questioning glance. “Is that . . . ?”

  “It’s a dinner knife. Cook let us borrow one from the kitchen for our composition.”

  “But the color. The red.” He stared at a line of red watercolor his sister had swiped across the blade of the knife. The wet pigment had run, adding a morbid subtext to the painting of a kitchen utensil.

  “Yes, well.” Phee turned so that Clarissa couldn’t see her and whispered, “You’ll note a definite theme.”

  “Good grief.” He moved to the next series of sketches and watercolors. Several depicted items they’d found during an expedition around the village. One series Clarissa executed particularly well featured headstones in Briar Heath’s church graveyard. Unfortunately, the young lady chose to add a few ghouls in the background, making sure to stream trails of red watercolor from their fingertips. As a dissonant counterpoint, each square or rectangle of watercolor paper had been decorated around the edges with hastily sketched flowers or stars or a smiling bunny.

  Kit shot her a look of genuine concern.

  “There’s no need to worry,” she whispered. “She has a colorful imagination.”

  “The main hue being blood red.” He braced his arms across his chest and tilted his head, assessing the drawings again, and a little smirk began tipping the edges of his mouth. “A bit bloodthirsty, isn’t she?”

  “You didn’t hear it from me,” Phee replied quietly, “but I’ve occasionally spotted a penny dreadful in your sister’s possession.”

  Kit cleared his throat. “You didn’t hear it from me, but I sent them to her.” After an indulgent glance at his sister, Kit squared his gaze on Phee. “I feared our father might do his best to snuff her spirit. Perhaps I should have been here to encourage her.” The pain in his eyes made Phee’s throat burn. Muscles in her arms twitched. Every instinct told her to reach for him.

  “Your guilt benefits no one.” She drew in a deep breath, wishing she’d spoken less harshly.

  He didn’t seem to take offense. In fact, he offered one of his appealing grins. “You can’t scold away my regrets, Ophelia.”

  “Do you harbor regrets?” Phee wondered if he counted his feelings for her among his mistakes.

  He laughed but with a mirthless rasping sound. “Regrets are my constant companions. They’ve been at my back for years. Now I must face them.”

  Kit looked straight at her as he spoke, studying her in a way that once made her believe he could see behind skin and bones to the thoughts in her head and the feelings in her heart. “Phee.” He lifted a hand as if he’d touch her, then lowered a curled fist to his side.

  “All right. If you’re going to stand over there whispering about me, I’ll show you,” Clarissa announced from the corner of the room. She’d uncovered her painting and had taken up a tube of paint and a brush to add a few daubs of color.

  Kit and Phee walked side by side toward the canvas. Clarissa stepped back to let them gaze at her creation, bouncing on her toes as she scanned their faces for reactions.

  “Mercy,” Kit breathed. “Definitely bloodthirsty.”

  “It’s extraordinary,” Phee added. “So full of movement.” And violence. In the center of the ornately painted Gothic border, an angry young woman thrust a sword toward a miserable-looking young man. Judging by the fierce look on the lady’s face, the gentleman didn’t stand a chance. “Who does it depict?” Clarissa often chose characters from literature to appear in her recent paintings, though this piece was grander than anything she’d attempted before.

  “It’s Ophelia.” Clarissa clasped her hands behind her back and smiled.

  Kit sucked in a breath and stared at Phee, glancing down at her hands as if to ensure she hadn’t tucked a sword under her skirt.

  “Ophelia from the play,” Clarissa added in an exaggerated tone of frustration. “Surely you know Shakespeare’s play, Kit. Have you ever performed Hamlet?”

  “I haven’t, but I do know the play.” He swiped one hand across his mouth and gently placed the other on
his sister’s slim shoulder. “Clary, sweet, Ophelia dies in the play.”

  “I do know that.” Clarissa rolled her eyes and began shaking her head, setting a few golden ringlets bobbing against her neck. “But I don’t think she should. She ought to be the one to uncover the plot, and Hamlet should be the villain. I like the notion of Ophelia avenging everyone.”

  After casting a bemused glance Phee’s way, Kit fixed a smile on his face and patted his sister’s shoulder. “In that case, it’s splendid. What do you think, Clary? Should we invite Miss Marsden to join us for lunch?”

  “No,” Phee answered before they could offer. “Perhaps another time. Today I’m taking lunch with my sister.”

  Kit frowned, tension tightening the fullness of his lips.

  “I’ll be off, then.” Despite declaring her intention to leave, an invisible string held Phee in place. Kit stood watching her as if he wished to speak but couldn’t find the words. He swallowed hard, and she trailed her gaze down the length of his neck to that fascinating shadow at the base of his throat.

  “I have work to get on with too,” he said in the brusque but civil tone his sister Sophia usually employed. “Good day, Miss Marsden.” He strode out of the room, the weight of his footsteps thudding against the floorboards, without sparing her another look.

  Her skin chilled. No, not her skin. Her chest, somewhere deep in the center. She longed for the cloak she’d left with the footman downstairs.

  All the anger of their first encounters had gone, but it left her feeling empty. Except for regret. Every time she saw the man, she turned into a fool. Distracted by his scent and the desire to touch him. Sniping at him. Averting her eyes like a skittish miss. She had never been that.

  And all of it was a facade, barriers erected to protect her heart. She was a terrible actress, apparently.

  Somehow, she needed to face Kit and be unaffected. To show him, and prove to herself, that she could accept the here and now and not cling to whatever they’d been to each other in the past. He wouldn’t be part of her future, but she did not wish to be his enemy.