by Edith Layton
Shall I congratulate you, or saddle up your horse and help you ride off into the night?” a weary voice said from out of the darkness.
Montrose dropped the boots he’d just removed in the outer hall. He sank to a chair in the inn’s bedchamber and stared into the darkness. “You’re awake,” he said.
“Of course. How could I sleep? You tiptoed out of here as quietly as a bull elephant. Not only was I awake,” Whit said, rising to one elbow in the bed, “I was observant, out of curiosity and a care for your life. You will note, or would if I lit a lamp, that I am also dressed. There was scant moonlight but enough once your eyes get used to it. I saw you go out and watched you while you were outside. You weren’t shot or kidnapped, so I didn’t race to your rescue. But there was danger enough, I’d say. You’ve been out playing with fire, old friend. Did you get burned?”
Montrose ran a hand over his eyes. “No,” he said abruptly. “I should have insisted on a separate room.”
“Much good it would have done. Then you would have slept in the loft in the barn with our valets,” his friend said as he rose from the bed and began to remove his jacket. “There isn’t another space to be found in this place. I looked. Lady Carstairs demanded her own room, and you were playing the Cavalier. You granted it to her. Miss Phillipa got her own room too. Other travelers hogged the rest. We are stuck with each other.
“You aren’t the most charming bedmate I could have found,” Whit went on, “but if I can bear it, so can you. In fact, this mattress tick is so overstuffed that if you get into bed, you’ll discover it’s difficult to get out of, much less roll about. So we won’t disturb each other. Enough. Out with it. Are you compromised? Or did you compromise her?”
“It was too dark to see my hand in front of my face,” Montrose complained. “How could you see her?”
“As easily as you did.”
“I was whispering to her.”
“Ah. She has ears on her lips. Talented lady.”
Montrose rubbed the smile from his own lips, stripped off his neckcloth, and threw it to the side. “I suppose you wouldn’t believe she had something in her eye?”
“Oh, that I do. It was you.”
“She didn’t cry foul,” Montrose said, peeling off his jacket. “Neither do I. It was an impulse. A moment.”
“Yours or hers?”
Montrose ignored him and pulled his shirt over his head.
“To frighten her away?” his friend asked as Montrose’s head emerged again. “To chase her back home?”
“To comfort her. To comfort me. Who knows?” Montrose said, shrugging. “It was, as you so nicely noted, a huge mistake.”
“Unpleasant, eh?” Whit said, removing the rest of his clothes except for his breeches.
“No, damn your so observant eyes, but it wasn’t,” Montrose said with a snarl. “Quite the opposite. Oh, well. I’ll admit it. It was temptation and I succumbed, which surprised me as much as it does you.”
“No surprise. I like her,” his friend said, crawling into the huge bed.
“Then why aren’t you courting her?”
“Because I noticed how you look at her,” Whit said, “and the way you don’t speak about her. Because she’s a lady in distress, and that was always your weakness. Because she doesn’t seem to have a protector or a real friend in the world, and she’s intelligent, well spoken, and well bred. She’s made for you.”
There was no answer for a moment as Montrose stripped off his hose.
“Would you mind if I courted her?” his friend persisted. “I failed to mention that she is also rarely lovely. And though neither of us needs it, rarely wealthy too, I’d guess. Or will be. She’s old Carstairs’s only chick.”
“She’ll be wealthy if his slightly dotty wife doesn’t up and marry one of the footmen if the old fellow passes first,” Montrose commented sourly. “And yes, I’d mind. It would be interference. She wants to find her damned Noel.”
“And so she kisses you?”
Montrose ignored that. His eyes having adjusted to the scant moonlight, he stalked over to the nightstand nearby.
“And if she doesn’t find her Noel?” Whit persisted.
“She’ll find another in time. She needs that time. As for me? She’s charming and bright, and nevertheless I shouldn’t have acted on impulse. I can’t. I’m not ready to wed,” Montrose said as he poured water from a pitcher on the nightstand into the basin there.
“And as for me?”
“You aren’t serious.”
“Neither are you.”
Montrose cupped his hands and filled them with water, then splashed his face. “Brr. The least you could have done was to have the water reheated, Nanny,” he complained.
He didn’t say anything more until he’d scrubbed his face, bathed his bare chest, taken up a towel and was drying himself. “I said I’m not ready for marriage, not dead,” he finally said.
Then, clad only in his breeches, he approached the huge bed. “I have nothing against marriage,” he said. “And she is all you say. But I don’t really know her and she doesn’t really know me, and my job is to find her fiancé, not to be him. My only regret is that I may have ruined my masquerade. She may never think of me as a man milliner again. It was difficult even for me to pretend to be interested only in fashion at a moment like that.”
“So it was a moment.”
“Which is over now.”
“You’ve nothing against marriage?” Whit asked. “There’s another surprise. I thought you were determined to remain a bachelor.”
“Why?” Montrose asked, pausing at the other side of the bed, the outline of his slender figure tensed.
Now his friend foundered. “Well…because of your father, and his attitude toward you, and all that nonsense. I can’t think you’d find the prospect pleasing. Don’t forget, I’ve known you and your family for a long time.”
“I can hardly forget that. Our Duncan thought you were another brother until he was out of short pants,” Montrose said, relaxing. “But if my father was cruel it was only because he had no heart left to be kind. Was ever a fellow more unfortunate in his loves? My mother died before I could focus my eyes on her, and he couldn’t forget her. I look like her, they say. Hence, it was a long time before he could bear the sight of me.”
“You’re very understanding,” his friend murmured.
“Understanding someone is simple enough, there’s no energy involved. Not all my affect of a fribble, a languishing lump of Fashion, is assumed, you know.”
His friend’s laughter was low and disbelieving.
“No, really, I’d like to be lazy and unconcerned, I just can’t help getting involved with life,” Montrose complained. “But really, how can one not be sorry for my poor father? Anyway, he made it easier for me. He saw his attitude toward me for what it was, regretted it, and mended his ways. We’re actually friends now. He tried even more; he sought to give me a mother and married again. He married Elspeth; she was a joy. He loved her as deeply as he had my own mother. She gave him Duncan and peace of mind, until she shattered him when she broke her neck trying to prove her horsemanship. And so then he married Celeste, whom he didn’t love. Well, who would? A mistake. Better to have a heart broken than chipped away at. He’s stuck with her and their Theo the Terror now, and he couldn’t be unhappier.”
His friend was silent as Montrose obviously thought of something and returned to his cast-off clothing. He bent down, searched in his discarded jacket pocket, and produced an object. It was a pistol. Osbourne saw it in silhouette, glinting in the sparse light as Montrose again approached the bed, and stiffened. He only breathed again when he saw his friend tuck the weapon under the pillow he would use.
“Insurance for the night,” Montrose explained, as he got into the bed on the farthest side from his friend. “Never go to bed in a strange place without your breeches on, even if you’ve had them off for a sweet reason. And never sleep without cold steel of some sort under your head, so yo
u don’t get any in your brain. Gad. This mattress is so stuffed, I sink a foot.”
“You’ll be asleep in a tick,” Osbourne murmured.
“Lovely pun,” Montrose said, smiling.
“So then, if your heart is safe from being pierced, aren’t you afraid of it being broken?”
“I am not my poor father, thank the deity. I’ve never had to worry about it. My heart remains seriously unscathed. I think because I think too much.” He laughed. “My father is a more emotional fellow than I am, even if he never shows it. Don’t fret, Whit. There’s hope for me. If I feel desire I sate it. And if I have to do that with a different female than the one I really wanted, I can live with that if only because I don’t fancy settling down yet. No matter how I feel, I’ll be like a brother to the lady in the morning, and we’ll be in Brighton by nightfall, so the danger of traveling through Britain with a winsome wench will be over, at least for me.”
“If you find the elusive Noel? And what if he’s dead? Won’t you want to stay and comfort her?”
“I don’t think he’s dead,” Montrose said as he settled himself. He crossed his arms on his chest and looked up at the ceiling. “More and more I become convinced he is not. He left too fast and for mysterious reasons. Mysterious equals suspicious. And he left hardly any trail behind him. Murder victims leave some sort of trail. He’s vanished too completely. I begin to think that he’s hiding and that there’s more to this than I first thought.
“Old Carstairs was a force in the government in his youth,” Montrose went on, thinking aloud. “He still is counsel to the royals, the thinkers, the planners and plotters, and more importantly, the politicians. He knows everything about the government; he’s a fount of information. Consider the facts. We’ve been at war with France, king and consul, for almost half a century. Fifty years,” he marveled. “Can you credit that?”
“Centuries before that too,” his friend commented.
“Aye, but fifty years with little let-up? Incroyable, as they say. They’ve gone from king, to rabble, to opportunists, to the greatest one of them all: Napoleon, and from there to God knows where. They’ve been in turmoil for generations. My mother was born there. She was born to nobility and wealth and left in poverty. She escaped to come here and did with only her head on her shoulders, and lucky to have it.”
Montrose paused, and his friend thought he’d fallen asleep, but then his voice came clear.
“We’ve been at peace with France for scant months,” Montrose went on thoughtfully. “You know Bonaparte can’t get what he wants if we remain so. But he needs information about us as much as he needs arms. He’s a clever man. We may mock his size and his ambitions, but that’s like whistling in the dark. He is formidable,” he said, pronouncing the word with a French accent.
“He knows information is a weapon too. Our Noel may well have been sent to pick old Carstairs’s brain. Becoming engaged to his granddaughter may have been the last lever he needed to win over Carstairs’s last reservations. They talked. Perhaps the old man talked too much. Maybe he’s as daft as his poor wife seems to be now. I hope not.
“The errant fiancé’s trail seems to lead to Brighton. Why Brighton out of all England? Maybe because there are so many French émigrés there? They came in hordes during the Revolution as refugees; some stayed. But some came to England for other reasons. And some still do. Whatever it was that drew Noel Nicholson, if that’s his real name, interests me as much as alarms me. He may have had a political contact there. For all we know he may be back in France by now, talking to our enemies, because don’t doubt we still have them.”
“You’d pursue him there?”
“To the ends of the earth,” Montrose said on a huge yawn. “I gave my word. But not until tomorrow morning.”
She thought she’d be up all night, tossing and turning, her lips still burning, but the moment Pippa put her head on her pillow she dropped off to the first sweet easy sleep she’d had in a long time. Lord Montrose’s kiss had steadied her. Of course it had also aroused her. The fact of it, the nearness of his warm body, the taste and strength and scent of him had rocked her. But it had also comforted her. Not just because he’d found her desirable. She rejoiced, knowing that for a certainty now. That sort of electric kiss had to be real because it had shocked him as much as it had her.
But beyond that, there had been a connection made. An attraction acted upon in spite all effort to remain uninvolved. It had been there for him as well as for her. Of that, she was also certain.
His disregarding her as a woman had been a pose. His tenderness, the desire and yearning in his kiss had been real. That moment in the night had changed everything. She knew she wasn’t alone anymore.
So she hummed as she bathed in the morning, and smiled as her maid helped her dress. She laughed aloud for no reason as her maid did her hair, and blamed it on a coil of hair tickling her neck. When she recalled the gentle hand that had caressed her neck, she shivered a little and smiled again.
She danced out of her room and went to collect her grandmother. Her grandmother was also blithe. But that meant nothing. She always was at this hour these days because it meant she might be joining the gentlemen again.
But they’d breakfasted earlier, the innkeeper said. They were already attending to their horses, their servants, and the coaches. Still, Pippa and her grandmother made a good breakfast and went outside into a rarely lovely spring day.
Pippa was glad she’d worn her yellow and green walking gown and had let her hair down, so it could reflect the sunlight. Her grandmother was pert and amusing. The gentlemen bowed and exchanged easy morning greetings with them.
Pippa dared a glance at Sir Whitney when they did. Her heart slowed to its usual pace. Nothing in his expression or calm gray eyes showed he suspected anything of Lord Montrose, or her. Montrose had been a gentleman. He’d told no one. But when she finally gathered the courage to look fully at him, neither did anything in his calm demeanor suggest that he remembered anything of last night. She knew he couldn’t have forgotten.
She couldn’t, but she too kept any trace of her feelings to herself. She’d relive that delicious moment, gloat over it, study it, and think about all the possibilities only when she was alone again. Pippa’s heart was high as she stepped into the carriage. Brighton by evening! She’d certainly speak to him at dinner.
She settled herself in the coach and frowned. What was she doing? She wasn’t thinking about Noel. Not at all, and hadn’t since Montrose kissed her. No, she thought honestly, not since he’d come near her in the night. She was thoughtful but not gloating as the coach pulled off onto the main road again.
Her grandmother fell asleep almost immediately, so Pippa had time enough and to spare to do all the thinking that she hadn’t last night. Noel had never kissed her like that. Well, she supposed he had, but it hadn’t felt like that. Still, what folly for her to form a new tendre now, and especially for a man of so many affects and poses, secrets and moods! And yet, what difference did it make? It was a moment now forever gone. She knew she meant nothing to Montrose. Or did she? Pippa was lost in thought as the carriage rattled on toward Brighton, which might be the end of her search and, she realized, of her ambitions…that was, when she understood exactly what those ambitions now were.
Chapter 7
Pippa went to bed in the dark and awoke at dawn. She stretched herself, remembered where she was, and leaped up. She ran to the window and pulled back a curtain. Brighton! She was in a fine hotel in the center of town. Last night she’d noted that the hotel itself was clean, well furnished, and in good repair, but the darkness had obscured any real look at its surroundings. Nothing prepared her for the view out her high window.
A beautiful scene was before her. A long, oval, well-tended green swath lay in the center of the town, with lovely homes, inns, hotels, and shops on all sides of it. When she looked up she saw the glittering sea in the distance. When she looked into the middle distance, she saw the newly risen sun
glinting off huge golden domes and minarets. Surely that was some ancient church, built by a foreign order. But then she remembered she’d heard that the prince was building a luxurious pavilion here. Could he have created it?
Buildings of many styles bordered the long swath of grass in the center of the city. Staid old homes sat snug, near the road. Older buildings tilting with age stood shoulder to shoulder with new gray and white town houses. It all fit, somehow, and gave the view an aura of charm.
When Pippa looked directly down, she saw that with the rising sun came fashionable equestrians, cantering out for their morning’s ride, as they’d done in London that time she’d visited there. She stayed by the window, watching the well-bred, handsome horses and their equally well-bred and handsomely dressed riders.
Pippa put her elbows on the sill, and breathed deep. She scented the sea and the rare, fair spring morning. This was a far better place to be than Bath. The people she saw were young and able, or if not precisely young, then at least agile. It seemed a lively prosperous village. It was even possible Noel was here, or had passed through. She frowned. But if so, why? And where was he now?
If she found him, could she ever forgive him for leaving and not coming back, not telling her his reasons, and not communicating with her for so long? If he were alive and well, would he want her forgiveness? It no longer mattered. All she wanted now was an answer; an end to the uncertainty and seclusion the situation had brought her. She smiled. All answers might be found here in gloriously glittering Brighton.
Pippa was up and dressed long before her grandmother stirred from her room. That was nothing new. Unless they were traveling on early in the morning, Grandmother stayed abed until noon. It was fashionable, or so she said. And Grandmother, for all her new flirtatious ways, was not a young woman anymore. But Pippa was, and she couldn’t wait to be out and about.
After she’d hurriedly washed and dressed, Pippa, in a blue walking gown, with a shawl over her shoulders and a pert straw bonnet on her flaxen hair to prevent the newly risen sun from etching freckles on her nose, left the inn to take the morning air. Her maid accompanied her. The girl was as eager as she was to see the town. Pippa sighed with pleasure. This time was her own. Her outfit was proper, so she didn’t worry about her appearance. Her maid was with her; so strange men wouldn’t accost her. But neither did either of the two men she knew. She frowned after she stepped out the door to greet the new day. There wasn’t a trace of the marquis or Sir Whitley to be seen, and they usually appeared with the dawn. At least, they appeared and then left to go riding together.