Black Sheep Read online

  Being the tallest moving creature everywhere he went, every sheep in every pasture he trespassed gravitated towards him until, by the time he reached that far and distant forest line beyond the final fence, he was wading through a ghost mob of fluffy whiteness, every one of them in desperate need of shearing and stinking to high heaven. They made very little sound as he dropped his luggage over the waist-high wall and into the woods beyond. Reaching up to catch hold of a tree branch for balance, he scaled to the top of the rocks and hopped down into the forest. He picked up his bags, slinging the sack over his shoulder as he turned to realign himself into a westwardly direction (hopefully—it had been a while since he’d last navigated by the moon and stars) and started walking again.

  He got two steps. That was when the bush tackled him.

  “Got you!” it cried. In a woman’s voice, he noted, and hit the ground face-first, coming up with a mouthful of leaves and dirt.

  “Ugh!” He spat and tried to get up on hands and knees, except that the bush was more agile. It wrangled itself upright first and promptly leapt at him again, latching onto his back in a tangle of branches and limbs and shoving him down flat onto his belly.

  “Thief!” the bush cried. “Did you really think no one would notice what you were doing?”

  Just when he thought the day couldn’t possibly get any worse...

  Growling, Leverton planted his hands against the damp ground and shoved, knocking her off him and scrambling up just far enough to tackle her in turn.

  Branches snapped as he bore the bush to the ground, finding curves and warmth amidst the covering of twigs and foliage. He made a grab for a shoulder and discovered instead the unmistakable softness of a sizeable breast that seemed to spring right out of the shadows and fit itself into his palm. As if it had been made specifically for his hand. Shocked as he was, he gave it a squeeze.

  Gasping, the bush boxed his ears, and Leverton let go of the breast. Trying to gauge where a head might be beneath all these shadows and branches, he started ripping away the disguise. It became quickly clear why he couldn’t see anything at all of the woman hidden within the shrub. Not only was she wearing a black dress—a black dress strategically camouflaged with twiggy, leafy bundles of bush that were tied into place with bits of twine—but when he touched her face his fingers came away smelling of shoe polish. He had to get in close before he could make out anything of her features, and then it was only by the grace of the moonlight that he found himself able to make out a pair of hotly flashing eyes.

  “Who are you?” he demanded, the question blurting out of him just barely ahead of the even more important, “Why did you jump on me?”

  “Oh, like you don’t know,” she hissed back. She yanked her arm out of his grip, smacking him in the chest and face with several switch-thin branches in the process.

  “Ow!” He reared back to keep from losing an eye, and she promptly rolled onto her stomach, crawling out from under him. Letting her go, he stood up slowly, rubbing his cheek. “If I knew, I wouldn’t have needed to ask.”

  “Sheep thief!” she snapped. Scrambling to her feet, she bounced twice in an effort to shake out both her dress and her branches.

  He quickly jerked a half-step back before he got slapped in the face again. “Sheep thie—You see me with one tucked under each arm, do you?”

  “No, and ha!” She thrust a finger into his face as if he’d made her point for her. “Because you brought them back!” She pursued when he took another step back. “Where’s the rest of them? Huh?”

  She thumped him in the chest with one small fist, the switchy branches attached to her arm thwacking his cheek and chin. If he hadn’t shut his eyes, one might have blinded him. He quickly slapped a hand over his stinging right eyelid.

  “Answer me,” she demanded and hit him again. “Huh? Where?”

  “Ow! Hey—ouch!” He tripped on a stick and nearly went down, and his temper quickly got the best of him. “Hit me again, woman, and I swear I’ll do some hitting of my own!”

  “Ha!” she blasted. “You deserve to be whipped!” She grabbed the branches off her own arm, ripping them from her costume to strike him about the head and shoulders. “Where’s my property?!”

  He threw up his hand to protect his head, but that first, sharp thwack cut across his fingers like lightning fire. “Ha-OW! Ga—dammit!”

  She couldn’t say he hadn’t warned her. There was only so much a man could take, and Leverton had taken his limit a good three miles back. He grabbed her arm before she could hit him again and then he yanked the branches from her hand.

  She tripped when she kicked at his shin, and they both went down in a heap of dead leaves and wet earth and a ropy tangle of what looked like ivy.

  “Get off me!” she yelled, swinging wildly as she struggled onto her back.

  He hadn’t meant to fall on her to begin with, but when her fist barely brushed across his chin, her knuckles sliding along his jaw as he jerked backwards to avoid that contact, that was the last and final straw.

  He heaved, flipping her completely onto her belly in the dirt and planting his knee between her shoulders to keep her there.

  “Villain!” she shrieked when he grabbed at her skirts, yanking to get the tangle of shrubbery and heavy fabric up over her kicking, thrashing legs. “Cad!”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” he snarled, baring the pale moon of her knicker-clad rump to the cool night.

  “Masher! Fiend!” she cried, struggling wildly but unable to find the leverage to pry herself back up off the ground. She gave up abruptly, grabbed onto his ankle with both hands and savagely sank her teeth into the back of his leg.

  His shin boots absorbed the worst of the pinch, but the intent was not lost on him.

  “You devilish little miscreant!” Grabbing at the branches of her costume, Leverton added three more lithesome verges to the two already clenched in his fist, and then sharply brought that makeshift birch down across her flanks.

  Her reaction was immediate and intensely satisfying. She yelped, a high-pitched mingle of pain and anger that abruptly ended her attempts to bite and rejuvenated his thrashing arm. He let her have it—five sharp slaps falling in rapid succession and sending leaves and twigs flying in all directions while she bucked, kicked and flailed. Her yelps turned to shouts (none of which seemed anywhere near remorseful enough), but he let her go at the end of five anyway, throwing his birch aside and vaulting stiffly back off her, in case she wasn’t quite done whacking at him. His eyelid, cheek, chin and fingers were all stinging and throbbing from the blows she had given him, and in his estimation, she could have used a good deal more whipping. However, she was neither his wife nor a female of any relation to him whatsoever. Angry as he was, this was not his place and he knew it.

  “Go home,” he told her, retrieving his luggage from amongst the ivy and leaves. “With any luck, your father will finish what I’ve just started!”

  With long, angry strides, Leverton started walking again. Without a single qualm of conscience, he left that lunatic bush lady kneeling on the ground, holding her blazing (hopefully) bottom in both hands and wincing expressively as she frantically rubbed and rubbed. With any luck, the fire he’d lit under the thin whiteness of her knickers would make a lasting impression. Not that it mattered to him, frankly. Not one way or the other, since the likelihood of his ever seeing this infuriating bush-woman again were completely laughable.

  Completely, utterly, and thank God for small favors, laughable.

  Chapter Two

  By the time Leverton reached Motteldine Hall, the moon was high in the night sky and a wool-thick layer of mist was blanketing the ground. It made staying on the road a challenge but, Leverton figured, so long as he was still tripping in and out of those ankle-twisting ruts, he must still be doing okay. And then he spied the Hall—rising up out of that ghostly haze, a structure of misplaced opulence encircled by dead, leafless trees and crawling with thick vines of ivy, as if the encroaching bog h
ad laid its claim and now sought to pull the building down into it—and staying on the road no longer seemed as desperate an issue.

  Every window was black but one. Near the door, a single candle had been left alight, drawing both newly-arriving estate managers and a whole slew of fluttering moths unerringly up the front porch steps to the glass. The mist flowed right up to the top stair and twined in ethereal wisps around his ankles as if reluctant to let him go. After two hours of stumbling around in the dark, it felt heavenly to finally be able to drop his bags. He flexed his hands and rolled his shoulders, indulging in a brief stretch before raising his hand to the knocker and briskly rapping it against the door three times. Hoping someone remained awake enough to hear him, half-wondering if he was going to have to sleep out here until morning, he leaned over to peer inside, cupping his hand against the glass as he tried to glimpse the interior beyond the amber glow of the candle.

  A moth flew right up his nose.

  “Ack!” Leverton recoiled, batting at his face and trying to sneeze until he no longer felt the fluttering of those blasted wings. Swearing prolifically, albeit under his breath, it was while he was trying to wipe the sensation of flying insects from his face that he first heard the faint, crunching footsteps of someone walking up the road behind him.

  She came out of the darkness by shadowy degrees, the broken, bedraggled branches of her costume leaving her to look less like a bush and more like someone who had been... well, rolled on the ground. She had more leaves in the tangles of her hair than on the twigs and branches that she’d tied to herself, and she was limping. Heavily.

  Maybe she’d twisted her ankle on that hazardous road. Surely he hadn’t spanked her that hard. Had he? Leverton caught himself before clapping a dismayed hand over his mouth. He kept his arms firmly at his sides, stubbornly swallowing all tell-tale signs of his unease as she came right up to the front porch steps and stopped.

  Maybe she was lost. Maybe she was a servant. Please, he thought, please, please let him have thrashed the bratty, irrational backside of some groundskeeper’s daughter or upstairs maid. Dimly in the back of his mind, he recalled her accusation: stealing my property, and that uneasiness in his gut turned queasy.

  Shadows bathed her features, but he knew she was glaring. At his boots, if the bow of her head could be interpreted as easily as the stiff set of her shoulders and the tight clenching of her fists as she alternately flexed and relaxed her fingers. Glaring the black right off his boots, with daggers in her eyes. Thank goodness looks alone had not, in the history of all the world, successfully done anyone in.

  Yet.

  He might be the first, because certainly his throat felt stranglingly tight when he heard himself ask, “You aren’t lost, are you?”

  Slowly, her chin lifted, dragging that daggersome gaze up his legs and chest to his face. The shadows still hid the upper portion of her features, but he could see her mouth now, the tightly frowning bow of her lips pressed thin with displeasure.

  “No,” she finally said. She began to climb the stairs, laboriously taking each step one at a time, leaning her hands and her weight on her right leg as she dragged the left cumbersomely behind her.

  Relief like a ten-stone anvil fell from his shoulders as he heard the telling clank of metal striking stone when her left foot settled on that first step.

  “Thank God!” he blurted aloud, and then laughed, throwing back his head helplessly as he reveled in a tidal wave of relief. She was wearing a leg brace; she’d been crippled before he’d laid hands on her.

  He stopped laughing just as quickly when he noticed she was glaring daggers at him again, and this time, standing on the steps with the glow of the candles chasing away the shadows, the flashing fury of her eyes could be seen quite easily.

  “I am not,” she said evenly, “crippled.”

  Dear Lord, had he said that out loud?

  “Of course not, uh...” The gentleman in him waded in past the blundering buffoon, and belated, Leverton moved towards her to offer a hand of support. “Let me help you.”

  Ignoring his hand, she stiffly climbed the last remaining step and limped past him to the door. She opened it without knocking, but then stopped again, one hand on the door handle and the other resting lightly on the frame, head bowed as she warred with her private thoughts.

  Probably deciding whether to slam the door in his face and wake the household or just quietly set the dogs on him herself, Leverton realized. “I’m expected,” he finally said. “My name is—”

  “Leverton Strathsford, the new estate manager,” she answered for him. “Yes, I realized that when I saw you standing here.”

  Her tone was as far from happy as a well-spanked upstairs maid’s would be after the kind of spanking he’d given her. Still, he was a little surprised when she eventually turned her head to look back at him. The glare in her eyes had eased from dangerous to seriously annoyed with a hefty dollop of ‘why me’ lurking around the edges. “Come in.”

  Leverton didn’t argue. This wasn’t the best of new employment beginnings, but at least he wouldn’t need to spend the night sleeping on the porch. And maybe, just maybe, she’d be so embarrassed over her behavior back in that sheep’s pasture, that she wouldn’t want to share the details of their rocky first meeting with anyone, much less the master of the house. That would certainly make it easier on him as the newest servant—oh, that word was going to take some getting used to.

  It was at the tip of Leverton’s tongue to suggest a pact of silence for the sake of their working relationship, except that no sooner had he set foot into the house than did the woman close the front door and walk quietly away. She moved fairly quickly for a woman with such a pronounced limp, the metallic clink of her leg brace echoing throughout the vaulted front hall.

  “This way,” she said, leading the way down a short hall and opening the door to the master’s den. His father had had a room just like it, the walls all lined with books, a comfortable settee and reading chairs half circling the fireplace where the coals still smoldered orange within. A reluctance of habit stopped Leverton in the doorway. When he was younger, the only time he’d ever been invited into his father’s den were for those rare few times when childish mischief was deemed worth a consequence more impacting than a simple scolding could provide. Leverton leaned in the doorway, but there was no crooked cane peeking out from amidst the umbrella handles in the column by the desk.

  It was a silly reluctance, anyway, and he made himself go in. “Should I... wait here while you inform the master of the house?”

  The bush didn’t answer, but limped across the Turkish rug to add a block of dried peat to the fire. She bent, stirring the coals with the hooked end of the poker until flames licked up along the quickly charring edges of tightly compacted vegetation. As the fire revived, the light of it splashed through the twigs and leaves to catch in her hair, turning the long tangles into sheer, shining gold. Her features as she glanced back over her shoulder at him, were thin and delicate and maybe even pretty, were it not for all that face paint.

  Leaning the poker back against the mantle, instead of leaving to fetch her employer, the woman in the bush costume retreated to the desk. Twigs and branches snapped as she sat down. She winced, shifting somewhat gingerly before folding her hands upon the desktop and looking at him, unsmilingly.

  They stared at one another, neither of them speaking, although Leverton could feel a sinking dread beginning to ice the interior of his gut all over again.

  “I admit, I probably deserved some of... what happened,” she finally began. “At the very least, I cannot say you didn’t warn me.”

  Leverton sank numbly into one of the two cushioned chairs on his side of her desk.

  “I also struck you first.” She blinked. “Maybe even two or three times first. That was... rather unladylike.” She blinked again, one corner of her mouth ticcing ruefully upwards as she, by the looks of her, quite painfully conceded, “Obviously, my... deductions as to your
guilt in the crimes that have plagued my pastures were... erroneous.”

  Her pastures... Leverton caught his forehead with one hand, staring at her in shock as those two words repeated themselves through his head. His hand slid down his face, pausing to cover his mouth until he was certain he would not be sick right here on the rug. At long last, his hand fell limp back into his lap. “Are you...” he shuddered to say it. “Are you the... mistress of the house?”

  “Yes, I am.” She glared at him, her face shifting through a variety of emotions before leaving anger completely behind her as she adjusted herself quite tenderly in her seat. Finally, huffing out a pained sigh, her shoe polish-blackened features settled on a look of intense regret. “I freely admit I jumped to all the wrong conclusions about you, but did you have to spank me with branches from my own costume?”

  He really was going to be sick. Reaching into his pocket, he withdrew the letter he had received after applying for Motteldine Hall’s position of estate agent. He unfolded it, hunting desperately for the signature and, preferably a misunderstanding that would make the queasiness in his stomach go away. “This is Motteldine Hall, right? You are E. Wainwright?”

  “Elspeth,” she supplied.

  Dear Lord—his hand caught his forehead again—he had spanked his employer. He really was going to throw up now.

  He stood up, a little unsteadily. “I beg your pardon,” he managed, his voice sounding significantly calmer than he felt. “I have no place to go tonight. If I might be permitted to sleep in the stable or the kitchen, I swear I’ll be gone first thing in the morning.”