by Louise Allen
It was infectious, open, genuine, and she laughed, too, not knowing why, only that this was completely disarming.
And then he kissed her. There were perhaps three seconds to make up her mind on how to react and she was aware of each of them in the thud of her pulse. Three seconds to decide whether to be charmed, or to be resentful, to be mastered or to fight. Or, perhaps, to meet him on equal terms.
One, two, three… Cris lifted his head, eyes watchful. He would not force her, she knew that. Whatever else this man was hiding from her, it was not a willingness to ill treat a woman. Tamsyn wrapped her arms around his neck, pulled his head to hers again and nipped at his lower lip, deliberately provoking. He laughed again against her lips, then probed with his tongue, risking her teeth, provoking in his turn.
This was the man from the sea, the man she had kissed in the surf without knowing why, only that it was right and she wanted him. Then they had been naked and that had been right, too, and they were wearing far too much now. Her hands ran down over the thin linen of his shirt, over the long, beautiful muscles of his back, down to the waistband of his breeches and she tugged, impatient, careless of rips.
He stepped back, breaking the kiss, to let her pull the shirt free and over his head, then his own hands were busy with buttons and pins and her gown was sliding from her shoulders, down to her feet and she was back in his arms, his skin hot and smooth under her palms, his mouth hot and urgent on the swell of her breasts above the neck of her chemise.
‘Yes,’ she said, closing her teeth on the tendon where his neck met his shoulder, biting gently, tasting his skin, tasting him. ‘Yes.’
‘Cris!’ The shout from outside froze them in place.
‘Hell’s teeth.’ Cris stepped back, looked round wildly for his shirt. ‘I must be out of my mind—the middle of the day in a confounded shed in the garden within a stone’s throw of the house and a dozen people. Are you all right?’ He dived into his shirt, dragged it on, stuffed it into his breeches while Tamsyn just stood and looked at him. ‘Get dressed! What are you doing?’
‘Looking at you.’ She wanted to smile at the sight of him, uncharacteristically harassed and urgent, dishevelled and flatteringly aroused. This was not the cool, calm and mysterious Mr Defoe, this was another man altogether and she was charmed as well as attracted. The sound of Mr Stone’s voice calling Cris came closer.
‘Dress, Tamsyn!’ He found the ends of his neckcloth, whipped it into some sort of knot, then moved to get between her and the door with its old glass panels fogged with salt spray. Through them, as she turned, she could see the blurred figure of the other man standing with his back to them. He seemed to be scanning the beach.
Suddenly seized with Cris’s urgency, she pulled up her gown, fumbled the fastenings closed, twitched the skirts, patted at her hair. ‘Am I decent?’
‘More or less. You’ll be the death of me, woman.’ He pushed in a few of her hairpins and smiled at her, suddenly tender, his hand cupping her cheek. ‘Do you want to be ruined?’
‘Yes, please,’ Tamsyn said demurely.
‘But not here—’
The door swung open behind him. ‘There you are. Cris, what the blazes are you doing?’ Gabriel Stone took a step inside, took one look at her, turned on his heel and went out again. ‘Or, rather, why the blazes are you doing it here and now?’ he enquired without looking back.
‘Insanity,’ Cris said without turning, his smile still promising things that made her feel reckless and eager. He stroked his fingers down her cheek and murmured, ‘We’ll talk.’ Over his shoulder he asked, ‘Is the coast clear?’
‘Completely.’ Gabriel Stone stepped aside to let them out on to the gravel in front of the summer house. ‘Everyone is in the yard admiring the sedan chair and arguing about which of the locals might be employed to carry it.’ He was still looking out to sea, presumably tactfully sparing Tamsyn’s blushes. She was amazed to discover she did not have any. ‘It will be a while before you can find two men suitable, I would suggest, Mrs Perowne. They need to be matched in size and strength, have good balance and endurance. Carrying a sedan chair is harder than it looks.’
‘You suggest I do not search too hard?’ She grappled to focus her mind on the issue and not on her pounding pulse, the excited flutter low in her belly, the ache in her breasts, the need to reach out and touch the man by her side. ‘But how long can these two men stay?’
‘As long as I am here, I will pay them,’ Cris said. ‘Call it a return for my board and lodging,’ he said when she began to protest. ‘When I leave they will stay for as long as you choose to employ them because this is their work these days.’
‘Bodyguards? You cannot pay for them as well as give us the chair.’
‘It is for my own peace of mind,’ Cris said. He offered his arm to her and she slid her hand into the crook of his elbow. Mr Stone fell in on the other side and offered his arm as well.
‘I feel very well protected between two gentlemen,’ she remarked lightly as they strolled across the grass. The switch from reckless passion to a sensible discussion was disorientating, and the presence of Gabriel Stone with his rakish understanding at finding them in a compromising position in the summer house only added to the feeling.
Gabriel Stone chuckled.
‘What is so amusing?’ she asked.
He turned thick-lashed dark brown eyes to study her. ‘In London you will find many who would say we are a disgraceful pair and that you are not safe with us at all. Certainly we would not add to your respectability.’
‘You would not? Mr Defoe seems entirely respectable to me.’ Except when he kisses me. You, on the other hand…
‘We are two of four close friends, referred to bitterly by the dean of our university as the Four Disgraces. We worked hard at proving him right and did not lose the habit when we went out into the world. Two of us have married this year, so are probably removed from any further temptation to be disgraceful, but Cris and I have a reputation to uphold.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ Cris said. ‘I am, as Mrs Perowne says, entirely respectable.’
‘You cultivate the appearance of it, but underneath you are as much of a rakehell as the rest of us.’ Mr Stone tucked Tamsyn’s hand more firmly into his elbow. ‘If you saw Cris at court, doing the pretty amongst the ambassadors and the courtiers and the politicians, to say nothing of their wives, you would not recognise this man in his shirtsleeves facing off with Riding Officers.’
Beside her Cris seemed to go still, although he continued to walk, his steady pace unchecked.
‘You are often at Court? I thought you said you were a landowner.’
‘I am. I just happen to be well connected enough to attend St James’s, which is nothing very unusual. It is hardly as exclusive as its habitués would like to make out.’ He shrugged. ‘I find politics and diplomacy interesting. Unlike Gabriel who is as close-lipped as a clam most of the time and as indiscreet as a village gossip when he does open his mouth.’ There was an undertone of threat in the teasing words.
There was something he was not telling her, although she could guess what it was. Crispin Defoe was not the country landowner he pretended to be, he was someone who mingled in society, someone used to London. Someone used to authority and privilege. So what was he hiding? And, more to the point, why was he hiding it?
Try as she might, she could not think of any reason that Cris might be a danger to her, or to those at Barbary Combe House. He had come into their world by accident and the fact that he was being less than open about his own life was probably simply reticence and not in any way sinister. And I want him. Was her desire for him blinding her to concerns she should be feeling? No, she decided. Franklin made her uneasy, unsettled, suspicious. Cris made her feel safe, even when she knew her feelings were definitely unsafe.
Aunt Izzy came to the front door, saw them and waved. ‘Dinner in thirty minutes,’ she called. ‘We have quite lost track of time with all this excitement and Cook is thre
atening a disaster with the fish if we are late.’
‘I must go and tidy myself up,’ Cris said. ‘Return to my entirely respectable self.’
‘And I will show you to your room, Mr Stone. Hot water will have been taken up for you.’
*
‘I’m confused.’ Gabe lounged into the dining room, where Cris, decently washed, dressed and combed, was waiting for the rest of the household.
‘You’re confused? I can’t imagine what you are doing here—and don’t give me that line about curiosity. You are never so curious as to put yourself out with a journey of over two hundred miles to one of the most inaccessible parts of England.’
‘I told you, I’m removing myself from temptation and telling myself I am not quite such a rogue as to ruin a respectable young lady.’ He shrugged when Cris lifted an eyebrow. ‘And Kate is worried about you. She thinks you are in love and moping. But the timing is awry, unless you met Mrs Perowne earlier this year.’
‘Kate said…’ Hell’s teeth. Had he been that obvious when he and Gabriel had visited their old friend Grant Rivers, Lord Allundale, and his new wife, Kate? He had thought he had concealed his heartache over Katerina very effectively behind his usual cynical exterior. Apparently not.
Thinking about Katerina did not bring the jab of pain he had become used to. The shock of that realisation almost took his breath away. Was he so shallow, so hard-hearted, that he could shrug off the heartbreak of true love, simply because he was distracted by a lovely woman and a mystery?
Unless, of course, he had not been in love in the first place. Cris moved down the length of the room, away from the door and into the deep window embrasure to absorb that thought.
‘Kate was mistaken,’ he said quietly. ‘There was a woman I could not have. It preoccupied me for a while, that is all.’ It occurred to him that there had never before been something that the Marquess of Avenmore wanted badly, yet could not have. Was that all that had been wrong with him? An attack of pique, added to sexual frustration and a heady dose of forbidden romance and he had thought himself in love? If that was the case, he was not at all sure how that made him feel.
The doubt made him almost dizzy. Ridiculous. He was never doubtful, certainly not to the extent of rocking on his heels as though he had drunk too much. Cris steadied himself with one hand on the window frame. He was always in command of his emotions, clear about his motivation. But now… Had he almost drowned himself out of sheer inattention because of the delusion he was in love?
Gabe, card-player extraordinaire, was watching his face, his own expressionless. He did not have to say anything. It was obvious he thought that Cris had ricocheted from one unsatisfactory amour to another.
‘I was not in love.’ I think. Perhaps. Damn it, I should know, surely? ‘I am not in love,’ he repeated more firmly. ‘And I do not intend to find myself in love. I intend to leave here when I am confident that the ladies are no longer in any danger and I am then going to find myself a suitable, sensible wife. Kate hardly knows me. What she calls moping was merely the gloom brought on by contemplating matrimony.’
Gabriel’s mouth twisted into a wry smile, but he did not respond to the attempt at levity. ‘So what, pray, was going on in the summer house just now? And what is this I hear about you almost drowning yourself?’
‘If I have to explain to you that Tamsyn and I are verging on the edge of an affair, then it is you we need to worry about, not me. As for the near drowning, I underestimated the power of the currents off this coast. I was not paying attention, that is all.’
‘You always pay attention, Cris,’ Gabriel murmured. ‘And you are never transparent. Now I can read you like a book and you lose focus almost fatally. I think—’
Whatever he thought was, mercifully, interrupted by Aunt Rosie being helped into the dining room by the footman, Isobel and Tamsyn behind her. Cris let out the breath he had not been aware of holding and set his face into the blandest and most neutral of all his diplomatic expressions.
Chapter Eleven
Cris ate and smiled and kept up his share of the conversation, which was not difficult when the two older ladies could talk of little else but the wonder of the sedan chair and all the expeditions they could take with Isobel riding her hack and Rosie being carried, safe and comfortable at her side. He had taught himself to carry on a dinner-party conversation in three languages while puzzling over a coded letter, planning a meeting and thinking about a new pair of boots. This cheerful domestic meal, even with Gabriel’s sardonic eye on him, was child’s play.
It gave him the opportunity to think about the self-revelation Gabe had forced on him. He had, somehow, deluded himself that he had fallen in love with Katerina and that was inexplicable. Yes, she was an attractive, intelligent woman—what he knew of her, which was very little. Yes, she had been attracted to him. But that was all. He had never been in love before, he was not in love now. There was no point in trying to convince himself that he had not lost temporary control of his reason over a woman.
It could have been a disaster. If he had not been so strong with himself about duty, honour and the need to protect both their reputations, the whole affair could have blown up into a diplomatic scandal, meant ruin for Katerina and probably someone dead on the duelling ground. And he would be a disgrace, tied to a woman who was quite intelligent enough to see through whatever protestations of devotion he made to her once their ruin had been accomplished.
What had come over him? He was not some green youth talking himself into love with an unobtainable beauty. He was, on the other hand, a mature man facing the prospect of making a suitable marriage and resenting it. He had always prided himself on his detachment and his independence and the only relationship that he had ever allowed to become personal, to matter, was his friendship with Gabe, Grant and Alex Tempest, Viscount Weybourn.
Was that what this was about? Had he armoured himself against the faceless, unknown, woman he was going to marry by telling himself that his heart was already taken, that marriage was a matter of form, of convention and of convenience, something that would not get close to him, could not hurt?
‘Mr Defoe?’
It took him a moment to remember that was who he was, that someone was speaking to him. It seemed that he had been over-confident and his dinner-party skills had disintegrated along with everything else. ‘I am sorry, I was distracted for a moment.’
‘I was just remarking what a spectacular sunset there is this evening,’ Aunt Rosie remarked.
The wall behind her was suffused with pink and those with their backs to the windows turned to admire the sight as the hot red disk of the sun dropped into the sea.
‘You almost expect to hear it sizzle,’ Tamsyn said as the colour faded. She rang the little hand bell by her side plate and when Michael came in, she gestured to him to light the candles. ‘There will be a full moon tonight.’
‘A smugglers’ moon?’ Gabriel asked.
‘Certainly, if there is a big run, then moonlight helps, especially if they are going to load it straight on the ponies and head inland,’ Tamsyn explained, surprising Cris with her lack of reticence in talking about the subject. ‘But the men know the coast so well that they can land with only the aid of a few dark lanterns on shore.’ She sent him a quizzical look. ‘You don’t want to take any notice of what that Riding Officer said. That’s just some foolish rumour. There’s no serious smuggling going on around here these days. I would know.’
She kept them entertained with tales of the last century when the gangs ruled the coast, then teased the two men with local ghost stories.
‘I’ll be safe riding back tomorrow, will I?’ Gabriel demanded with mock alarm. ‘No fear of finding Old Shuck loping at my heels, or headless horsemen or drowned sailors or any of those other horrors in broad daylight?’
‘Surely you are not leaving us so soon, Mr Stone?’ Isobel asked. ‘Do stay a little longer. I am sure you cannot have had time to discuss your business with Mr Defoe ye
t.’
‘This evening after dinner, ma’am…’ Gabriel began.
‘Not after the long day you have had,’ Rosie said firmly. ‘You relax this evening and see to your business tomorrow morning, then we can all take a picnic up on to the clifftops to celebrate my wonderful new sedan chair.’ When he hesitated she reached out her twisted fingers and touched the back of his hand. ‘Won’t you indulge me with your company? We are so quiet here that a charming and intelligent guest is too precious to lose.’
‘Ma’am, you overwhelm me with your hospitality. I would be delighted.’ It brought Cris out of his uncomfortable thoughts to see Gabriel succumbing to the charms of a woman old enough to be his mother, if not his grandmother. He normally avoided respectable older women like the plague and confined his conversation, and his attention, to high-flyers and dashing society matrons.
Tamsyn rang the little bell again and got to her feet as Michael came in. ‘We will leave you gentlemen to your port and nuts.’
Amidst the minor flurry of helping Rosie from the room Cris drew Tamsyn aside. ‘Where can we talk?’
‘Talk?’ She looked up at him and blushed. ‘The summer house at midnight.’
‘That is too close to the house—and uncomfortable for…conversation,’ he said, making her blush harder.
‘Uncomfortable for talking? I think not. But I will take you on a walk, if you are not frightened of meeting Black Shuck. Wear good boots for rough ground. Coming, Aunt Izzy!’
When he turned back Gabriel had returned to his seat and was pouring ruby port into the pair of fine Waterford crystal glasses Michael had set out for them. He raised his glass and sniffed. ‘Excellent port, duty paid or not.’
Edgy, Cris picked up the other glass and walked round the room to study a pair of sketches in the alcove by the fireplace. ‘They’ve some nice pieces here. I like the ladies’ style—Miss Isobel in particular will take some earthenware jar from the local potter, fill it with wild flowers and stand it on an exquisite Sheraton side table and it will look perfect.’