Page 4 of Barbarous

Daphne knew her egalitarian behavior—a relic of being raised by her coal-heiress mother—still shocked the Lessing Hall servants, even after a decade. But really, why should the man stand around while food spoiled?

She prepared four more plates and within a short time they were all settled on the blanket with food.

* * *

Daphne had no appetite.

Instead, she crumbled a piece of Cook’s excellent bread into increasingly tiny pieces while her sons peppered Ramsay with endless questions about his horse.

She had questions of her own and they pushed their way into her mind like hungry weasels invading a henhouse. The most pressing question of all was how much Ramsay had heard before he’d interrupted her undignified fracas with Malcolm.

Had he heard Malcolm’s threats? The blackmailing? The accusations about the twins?

For years she’d been haunted by nightmares that someone would eventually learn of her lies and expose her to public shame and ridicule. But never had she expected to face the man her deception had wronged the most.

Daphne studied that man from beneath lowered lashes.

She’d been a girl when Hugh Redvers disappeared, but—like every other female between eight and eighty—she’d been bewitched by the Earl of Davenport’s wild, handsome heir. The young lord had not only looked like a Greek god, he had always had a kind word and ready smile, even for a gangly, shy, and bespectacled neighbor girl ten years his junior.

He laughed at something one of the boys said and the sound pulled Daphne from her trance, making her realize she’d been leaning toward him, like a moth hovering too close to a flame.

Daphne shook her head at the fanciful thought and resumed her examination. She had to admit that time—some of it harsh if his missing pieces were anything to go by—had made him even more attractive. She wrenched her eyes away from his face and catalogued the rest of him.

He was dressed in the manner of an English country gentleman, but there was a subtle foreignness to the cut of his garments. His forest-green riding coat was sculpted to his broad back and shoulders and his waistcoat was a pale green that matched his remaining eye far too closely to be an accident. As for the supple buckskins which encased several leagues of leg? Well, the less said on that subject the better. Daphne was still contemplating that skintight garment when Lucien’s insistent voice interrupted her ill-mannered ogling.

“Is that not correct, Mama?” Lucien’s tone let her know this wasn’t the first time he’d asked the question.

“Hmmm?” Daphne looked from her son’s dogged expression to Hugh Redvers’s grinning one, and her face heated like a schoolgirl’s, an unfortunate habit that showed no sign of abating with age. The dreadful man knew she had just subjected him to a ruthless, thorough, and intimate physical inspection; and he’d enjoyed it.

Daphne ignored his smirk and addressed her son. “Is what not correct, Lucien?”

“Papa promised that Richard and I could have our hunters when we turned ten. And that is only in a few months,” he reminded her, as if Daphne might have forgotten the day she gave birth to her only children. Lucien nudged his silent sibling and Richard nodded in support of his elder twin. Daphne sighed; the vexatious subject of hunters came up at least once a day.

“We can speak about this later, Lucien.” Oh, and they would, they would; her son was relentless.

She looked from Lucien’s stubborn face to the baron’s smiling one and decided it was past time she took control of the conversation.

“Have you only recently returned to England, my lord?” It was an asinine question, but, really, what question wouldn’t be at this point?

Ramsay’s smile grew, as if he could hear her thoughts. “Come, we are family—you must call me Hugh.”

“Family?” Lucien repeated, forgetting—at least for the moment—the matter of hunters. “Are you a cousin, like our cousin John Redvers?” Lucien frowned, “Although he is dead, now.”

Ramsay laughed. “I certainly hope I am nothing like Cousin John Redvers—dead or alive.”

Daphne hoped so, too. John Redvers had been a weasel-faced drunkard whose only achievement in life was the remarkable speed with which he had dissipated his inheritance.

When Hugh Redvers had been declared dead all those years ago, it had been John—his feckless younger cousin—who’d become the Earl of Davenport’s next heir. John had been one of the reasons—if not the reason—the earl had remarried in his seventies.

Another reason had been that the orphaned daughter of the earl’s closest friend had been seventeen, two months’ pregnant, and desperately in need of a husband.

“Mama?”

Daphne realized Lucien was still waiting for her to explain his kinship with the magnificent newcomer.

“Baron Ramsay is your papa’s eldest nephew. The one we’d all believed lost at sea so long ago.” Daphne cut him an accusatory look, but Ramsay appeared not to notice—or care—if his smile was anything to go by. Indeed, his handsome face wore the same expression of lazy amusement it had since the moment he’d entered the clearing. The only time he had not appeared pleased had been when he looked at, or spoke to, Malcolm.

“Papa told us about you, my lord,” Richard, her usually quiet and reserved son, said. “He said you were a better hand with a sword than anyone he’d ever seen.” Richard’s reverent tone implied that praise from his beloved papa was high praise indeed.