“Not a good day awaits you, I presume?” Rowan cast a smile her way.
She laughed without much humor. “I know she’s your employer’s cousin—”
“Several times removed.”
“And she and I grew up here together, but her brother’s death has . . . unsettled her.”
“Would you not be unsettled if someone threatened your family and then murdered your brother?”
Her chin lifted. Her mouth thinned. “I’d not have histrionics once, let alone several times a day.”
“The ice-blue ice maiden,” Rowan murmured.
They had reached a meadow fragrant with knee-high grass and pastel wildflowers, and she reined in to glare at him from those ice-blue eyes. “What. Did. You. Say?”
He grinned at her. “The first time I saw you there in the corner of Hookham’s, you regained your composure so quickly, I named you the ice-blue ice maiden after the color of your gown.”
The glare turned to a stare. A flush anything but icy crept up her cheeks, and her lips parted as though she were about to speak. Or maybe she looked more like she was about to be kissed.
More likely he only wished she looked like she was about to be kissed—and like she wanted to be.
“And the way you went all stiff and prim and wouldn’t look at me—”
“Stop it.” She touched her heel to Grisette’s side, sending the mare skimming through the meadow to a path on the other side too overgrown to ride along.
At least the mare thought so. She balked at the woodbine draped over a tree like a snake, dug in her hooves, and ducked her head.
Elizabeth stayed on. She was too good a horsewoman not to. But her hat tumbled off, and her skirt caught on the thorns of a bramble.
Rowan dropped his horse’s reins over his head and sprinted to Elizabeth’s side. “Allow me.” He reached for her ensnared skirt.
“Do not.” She slid to the ground and began to disentangle the fabric. “You have humiliated me enough for one lifetime, calling me an ice maiden, duping me the other night, not warning me before you walked into the grandparents’ parlor . . . I’ll be ruined if anyone knows how I was alone with you the other night. It’s bad enough Romsford knows. If the grandparents find out, I’ll lose my chance to inherit Bastion Point.”
She could inherit Bastion? The idea made Rowan feel sick. Inheriting the house and land would give her responsibilities she couldn’t leave, even if she wanted to.
Penvenan was no doubt right to laugh at Rowan’s aspirations.
“Would inheriting Bastion Point please you?”
She smiled at him with shining eyes. “I’ve never wanted anything else. This is where I’m safe. This is the only place I’ve ever been happy.”
As he went about his work days later, Rowan reflected on what Elizabeth had said. At one time she might have been safe there on the north coast of Cornwall, where Trelawnys had reigned with their wealth for a century. But Rowan was uncertain if that safety continued. It had ceased for the Penvenans, an even older family in the county than the Trelawnys. Someone had suggested Conan should have been dead for weeks before his murder.
Everyone suspected smugglers. They had terrorized the parish for as long as anyone living remembered. Cross them, snub the tea or bolt of fabric they left for payment when they borrowed a pony in the middle of a dark night, and things happened to the family. Stores disappeared. Livestock was butchered, and sometimes people died.
Yet Conan had opened the caves beneath Penmara to the smugglers to hide their boats and contraband. He used the power of his rank as a peer of the realm to protect them from too close inspections by the riding officers. He even sailed with them upon occasion, not for the thrill of risking getting caught as had Drake Trelawny, but because every penny went into holding impoverished Penmara together.
“But now it’s tearing it apart,” Conan had told Rowan on the first of their very secret meetings. “I’ve got to stop, but when I left messages that I was closing off the caves, the threats began.”
“When was that?”
“The week you and Cousin Austell landed in Plymouth. I came home to find a foul message on the door and Senara having histrionics.”
“That entail needs to be broken at once then.”
The sooner Conan sold Penmara and moved away, the better. But Rowan and Austell’s work on that behalf had failed in London. Entails were sacrosanct in England. Renewed with each generation of heirs to the land to protect it from slipping into the hands of those outside the family, breaking the restriction on the property’s ownership took three males in direct succession to the line of inheritance to break the entail. Penvenan and Rowan failed to find more male heirs between Conan and Austell Penvenan and had encountered obstinancy from the courts on severing the title from the land. Rowan traveled to Cornwall to discuss Conan going to London himself to handle the matter and learned of how Elizabeth had pleaded for her brother’s help.
“Let’s keep her safe from this bounder.” Conan spoke of his childhood friend with great affection that raised the head of envy in Rowan. “We’ll ride to meet her.”
But the dead bird had delayed them. They didn’t get to Elizabeth until nearly too late, and Conan had returned home immediately.
“I have to look after my own,” had been nearly the last words Conan spoke to Rowan. The last words had been, “Watch over all three of the young ladies.”
Senara, Elizabeth, and Morwenna.
Senara and Elizabeth were well enough inside Bastion Point. Miss Morwenna Trelawny looked a bit more vulnerable in an isolated cottage with a simple gate to lock for protection. Rowan didn’t know why or how he should look after this black sheep, and look after her he tried to do, which was not easy when he never even saw her. Still, he patrolled her cottage just after dark either on his way to or from the village. He never saw anything untoward.
He learned nothing in the single smoky room of the village tavern. He pretended to sip from a tankard of ale and listened for snatches of useful conversation spoken in unguarded moments from those who did not pretend to drink.
Except none of the conversation proved useful. Regardless of how many pints of ale some of the men downed, when Rowan walked into the taproom, conversation died, then started up again with only desultory remarks about the fishing or the planting, the mining, and even the latest Sunday sermon.
After a week, Rowan gave up on the tavern visits, if not the patrols of Miss Morwenna’s house. Late nights trying to learn something of the threats Conan had received and early-morning rides were taking a toll on his alertness. He would be of no use to anyone if he fell asleep supervising work on the Penmara roof and fell off. So he took to his bed early and went on early-morning patrols before his rides with Elizabeth, that precious hour that made the frustrating humiliation of working for Austell Penvenan tolerable.
Humiliating and potentially dangerous.
One morning when he stepped out the door to go for the morning ride, he found the corpse of a thrush flattened on the step.
Today, two and a half weeks after they began their early morning rides, Rowan determined to put the warning aside until later. He could do nothing about it until Penvenan awakened, and Rowan wanted nothing to marr his ride with Elizabeth. She seemed so happy to be back in Cornwall where she could ride. With her, he could forget murder and threats and be happy in her company. Her London pallor had faded behind delicate bloom in her cheeks, making her eyes even bluer. She simply sparkled in the abandon with which she rode, in the lilt to her voice when she spoke of the land, her childhood, and now, even the writings of Thomas Paine she had managed to spirit out of the library.
“Do you know who he is?” she asked him.
He laughed. “Of course. He influenced our revolution.”
“Have you read him?”
“I managed to muddle through a bit of it.” He grinned at her across the space between their mounts. “By the time I was fifteen.”
“Prove it.”
> So he did, and she gazed at him with such admiration his heart began to slip from its tenuous hold on not tumbling into love with her.
To give himself a few moments to collect and control his wayward heart, he asked her for more tales of her childhood. She told him of escapades and frolics with Conan and Drake, Morwenna, sometimes Senara—Hide and Go Seek in the caves, Catch as Catch Can on the beach, swimming in the cove at midnight. They had been undisciplined, unfettered, and left to their own devices far too often. In the end, she drew a picture of five young people with too little responsibility and too much free time, too much money on the part of the Trelawnys, and too little parental guidance or love.
He recognized it because it reflected much of his own childhood.
“Were you able to play much?” Elizabeth asked him as they walked the horses to cool them down and she plucked woodbine from a vine. “I mean, you haven’t had to work all your life, have you?”
“I wasn’t always poor, no.” He found a wild rosebud struggling for life amidst the honeysuckle. Its pale pink reminded him of the color of Elizabeth’s cheeks when she blushed. “I had schooling, but in the summer, we spent as much time as we could in or on the water. It’s so hot in Carolina.”
Elizabeth’s eyes lit. “Fishing?”
“Fishing.” He smiled down at her eager face. “Would you like to go?”
“I—” She pursed her lips.
He brushed them with the rose. “Speak the truth.”
She shook her head. “I cannot go out before dawn.”
“No?” He tapped her lips with the rosebud. “Seems to me you can.”
The grandparents seemed so occupied with estate business, justice of the peace duties, and charity work for the tenants, miners, and church, Elizabeth still enjoyed perhaps too much freedom.
She puffed out a breath, stirring the petals of the rose. “Take that thing away.”
“All right.” With her lower lip protruding and her eyes downcast, she looked so adorably sulky he couldn’t resist removing the rose and replacing it with his lips.
For one glorious moment, her lips, tasting of salt spray and rose petals, clung to his; then she shoved him away hard enough to stagger him back a pace and ran for her mare.
“Running, Elys Trelawny?” he murmured.
“I won’t let you ruin me.” She flung the accusation over her shoulder. “I won’t let you trick me into needing to wed you. I don’t care what Mama says. I am worth more than my fortune.”
Before Rowan recovered from his shock enough to know what to say, her momentum carried her up and onto the back of Grisette, and she sped away from the meadow, Rowan’s gelding following close behind at a canter.
By the time he caught up with her, she was preoccupied deep in conversation with the other Trelawny lady he was charged to protect—Miss Morwenna Trelawny, a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty as petite as Elizabeth was statuesque. He welcomed the opportunity to meet Miss Morwenna and regretted he now didn’t know when he would have another chance to talk to Elizabeth, for the night before, Penvenan had informed Rowan his two and a half weeks acting as Elizabeth’s groom would end.
“Unless you wish me to send you back to Charleston.”
That and only that must have prompted Rowan to be stupid enough to kiss Elizabeth and distress her so. He had to acquiesce to Penvenan’s command. He needed to convince the older man that the danger had not died with Conan.
CHAPTER 11
MORWENNA WAS THE LAST PERSON ELIZABETH WANTED to see just moments after Rowan Curnow kissed her. She needed time to let her heart cease galloping ahead of her horse and the tingling warmth of that brief contact to fade. But there Morwenna stood, one hand gripping the top rail of the gate onto Bastion Point land, and Elizabeth could not proceed without talking to her or running her over.
“Good morning, Morwenna, you’re looking . . .”—it burned her tongue, but it was the truth to say—“beautiful.”
Her hair, uncovered, glowed blue-black in the sunlight, and Morwenna’s face glowed as though lit from within. Despite her lack of inches in height and the roundness of her middle, she still moved with a kind of rolling grace.
Suddenly conscious of her straight hair, her pale skin, and her too tall, mostly too bony figure, Elizabeth added, “Though I didn’t realize you were, ahem, so very much increasing.”
“No, I suppose they didn’t tell you.” Morwenna curled her plump upper lip. “Though I don’t think they know. I didn’t show until three months ago, but now . . .” Her even plumper lower lip quivered and tears brightened her huge, dark eyes. “You’ve got to help me.”
“I’ve no idea how I can. I spent all this quarter’s pin money on getting to Cornwall.”
“Oh, you.” She swished her hand through the air like erasing a slate. “Do you think of nothing but money? I don’t need that—or not the little you could get your hands on. I’ve a place to live and enough food. But I need to come back to Bastion Point.”
A sharp remark stuck to Elizabeth’s tongue, but the desperation on Morwenna’s face dissolved the words before they emerged.
“You can,” Elizabeth said instead. “All you have to do is name the baby’s father.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Or marry him.”
“I can’t do that either.”
“Then how do you expect anyone to help you?” Elizabeth tossed back her head to cast her gaze at the crystal blue heavens, as though God would give her an answer.
When she brought her gaze back to her cousin, she caught site of Rowan emerging from the trees. She shot him a glare, a warning to keep his distance.
Elizabeth gave her head a toss of annoyance—and lost her hat. She sighed.
Morwenna grasped the snaffle and held on as though she could keep motionless a horse ten times her weight. “Please. I’ve never asked a thing of you. Please ask Grandpapa to relent.”
“Morwenna, you have asked a great deal of me over the years. Remember the night you climbed down the ivy to meet Sam Carn and I let you back in?”
One corner of Morwenna’s mouth twitched. “I did forget. Poor Sam.”
Elizabeth backed her mount. One of the mare’s hooves crushed Elizabeth’s fallen hat. “But that changes nothing for us. I’d not have helped you with your wanton behavior then. I cannot help you now.”
“All right then, do nothing.” Morwenna crossed her arms over her rather expanded front. “Do nothing, and I shall see to it Grandpapa learns what you were doing in the meadow just now.”
Though she remained upright on her mount, Elizabeth’s stomach felt as though it plunged to the ground to be trampled upon like her hat. “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. You were not in the meadow.”
“Ha.” Morwenna snorted. “I didn’t need to be. I can see into the meadow from the roof of my cottage.”
So she could.
Only with great effort did Elizabeth stop herself from clutching her roiling middle. “Why?” She didn’t even attempt to make herself speak loudly. “Why would you do that to me?”
“Because I and my baby are in danger.”
If Morwenna didn’t look so frightened, Elizabeth would have laughed in her face. But not even Morwenna was that good an actress to make her complexion pale and her pupils dilate.
“All right.” Elizabeth made her hands relax on the reins so Grisette didn’t shy and possibly hurt Morwenna or knock her rider to the ground. “I’ll do what I can with Grandpapa.”
“And save your precious reputation. Lily-white Elys can’t be caught kissing the hired help.” Her smile displaying a cynical twist to it, Morwenna spun and plowed away, her gown with its extra fullness flying around her in the breeze.
Her black gown, as though she were in mourning. Or perhaps that was all she could find large enough.
Gritting her teeth over the way she’d been manipulated into doing her cousin’s bidding—far from the first time in their lives—Elizabeth wheeled Grisette around to find Rowan
Curnow still waiting. He’d dismounted and was walking his gelding in a circle to keep him from standing too long, an action showing consideration for the well-being of his mount. She could believe he was a kind and considerate man, except he manipulated her, took advantage of her desire for moments of freedom—for what purpose? Surely not simply to spend time with her. No one simply wanted to be with her without some ulterior motive.
Since when had she ceased taking life into her own hands and managing matters for herself instead of letting others control her?
The answer left her hollow—since her attempts ended in disaster. She intended to stop Romsford’s interest in her by kissing a stranger at a ball. She ended up with her parents all but announcing her engagement to the marquess. She escaped from London, only to spend hours alone in the night with a man who was beneath her touch even if she weren’t a great heiress. And before that? Yes, she made herself as unapproachable as she could because she wanted to return to Bastion Point, and Rowan Curnow had given her the sobriquet of the ice-blue ice maiden.
Which she wished she were around him.
Watching him from the corner of her eye, she paused long enough to finger comb her hair and twist it into a plait. Rowan didn’t mount straightaway. He retrieved what was left of her hat and brought it to her.
“I think it’s done for.” His beautiful blue eyes sparkled with laughter.
Elizabeth frowned at the once pretty but useless chapeau and couldn’t stop a smile of her own. “I am afraid you’re right. I think it only good for the rubbish bin.”
“I shall oblige you.” He tucked the crumpled hat into his coat pocket. “Are you ready to go home now?”
She nodded, and they trotted around a field newly planted, then cut through the parkland to reach the stable unseen from the house. In the stable yard, Elizabeth dismounted without assistance, then stood with her hands clasped before her. She should simply walk to the house, change her dress, and go find Grandpapa, if she could do so without Senara intercepting her. Yet Rowan Curnow had spent hours with her, making possible riding more than at a sedate pace. Simply turning her back on him seemed rude. She would even thank a groom, and he was higher in rank than a groom. But she could not go on meeting him. Not now. Not when she could still feel his lips on hers and her spontaneous response.
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