An English Lord's Love Affair

Chapter 1.1. Buried Under A Trunk Of Petticoats

England
1814

The late Benedic Farningham, Viscount Strathmere, was returning to life in a sea of women's underwear. From ear to ankle he fought a sensual undertow of lacy shifts and white silk stockings, his muscular arms tangled in the ties and tapes of lavender-scented buckram stays, his heavy thighs wrapped in a pair of dainty French percale pantalettes. Like a wounded beast of the night, he had eluded capture and taken refuge in the last place his pursuer would think to look.

Summoning a primitive instinct for survival, he had climbed the sturdy oak tree outside the manor house and hauled his bruised and bleeding six-foot frame over the windowsill. Hopeful he had outwitted the man who chased him, he had then collapsed—into an open trunk stuffed with personal female attire and frivolous accessories.

He was not too exhausted to appreciate the irony of the situation.

For now at least he had managed to escape the man who was hunting for him. Yet moment by moment his life's blood was saturating an unknown woman's muslin petticoats and blush—pink stockings. Pain seared his upper body. Gritting his teeth, he unraveled from his elbow a flimsy lawn chemise embroidered with blue silk forget-me-nots. His gaze unfocused and brimming with devil-try, he examined it in the moonlight.

If he was going to die, for the second time in a month, he might as well go out on arousing sexual fantasy. "Well," he murmured, "what sort of woman are you anyway? Fast or merely fashionable? Do I have a choice? Then give me fast."

Unfortunately the maidenly garment failed to inspire a potent sexual image in his mind. The owner did appear to possess a decent pair of breasts, although Benedic was admittedly not capable of objective appraisal in his current condition.

God help them both—the poor woman would suffer a heart seizure when she found his carcass buried in her drawers. It seemed to him that he had once owned this creaky old manor, at some time in the murky past, and he tried to remember who had bought it from him. To his frustration his brain refused to focus, images flitting elusively behind his eyes like moths in the shadows.

A retired sea captain, wasn't? Sir Hickory or Humpty. Something, his wife and daughter. Their names escaped Benedic at the moment. Bleeding to death, he hoped he would be forgiven the lapse in manners.

"Humpty Dumpty had a great fall," he muttered. "But who the devil was his wife?" If he was wallowing in the women's underclothes, he ought at least to know her name.

Many would remark that Benedic being found dead in a trunk of petticoats was not surprising for a former English scoundrel who had thumbed his nose at society. His closest friends might even have chosen to bury him in a shroud of female underclothing as a loving tribute to his past sins.

Except that Benedic had been officially "buried" a month ago, mourned by a few, cursed by many. Aside from the persistent rumors of his ghost popping up in the oddest places and doing the naughtiest things, no one really expected to see him again.

Not his servants or scattered acquaintances.

He trusted only one person. The man who had helped him arrange his own funeral.

The late-evening silence of the country estate was marred by thumping footsteps, a bottle being kicked over, an irate male voice coming from the front of the house.

"Somebody open the bloody gate!" the gardener shouted from the driveway below. "The carriage is coming over the bridge!"

"The bloody gate has been open for an hour!" the groom shouted back.

"Company," Benedic said with a mordant sigh, tossing the embroidered chemise over his shoulder. "I suppose I ought to tidy myself up—if I'm expected to entertain."

He looked like a nightmare cast up from hell, and he knew it. His lanky frame had lost flesh. The hollows below his cheekbones gave his masculine face a dangerous gauntness. The lugubrious pattern of surgeon's stitches that crisscrossed his chest and left shoulder had been torn during his tree-climbing escapade. Taking a breath that burrowed into his lungs like talons, he felt with his uninjured arm for the windowsill and hoisted himself upright for a few moments of enlightening agony.

His gray eyes widened in approval as he took stock of his surroundings.

"Well, isn't this convenient?" he said, clenching his teeth against a wave of pain. "A room with a view."

His own estate lay across the swathe of moonlit road on a wooded rise. Warm beams of candlelight glowed from the bedroom window where he had been brutally stabbed "to death" three weeks ago. His uncle, Colonel Sir Edward Winslow, had already taken possession of the house, and if Benedic had access to a spyglass, he could have identified the shadowy figure standing behind the curtains.

The taunting silhoutte belonged to a woman, he thought in cynical detachment. Of that he had no doubt. But whether she was the same lady who had shared his bed while he was callously being stabbed, he could not say. Nor did it mattered now. That love affair belonged to a past life and had died along with his previous identity. His feelings for his former mistress were as dead as she believed him to be.

The clip-clop of approaching horses, the churning of carriage wheels on the road, interrupted his troubled reflections. Pray God whoever owned this trunk would not decide to explore her dressing closet tonight. For if he was any judge of women's underwear, and it so happened that he was, then the delicately proportioned owner of these garments would quite indelicately scream her head off when she discovered a ghost in her intimate garments.

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