by Devilish
Diana thought she could see a speculative light in her maid’s eyes, and speculations were buzzing inside her as well. She turned to the main coach with little bubbles of excitement starting to fizz.
Not, of course, that she had any intention of allowing him to seduce her—especially straight from another woman’s arms!—but still …
Perhaps he wanted to talk more of this feeling that burned between them.
Perhaps he would rub her feet again.
Perhaps …
Only as she entered the luxurious coach did she notice that the opposite seats had disappeared. It took only a little investigation to see that they folded up into the front wall of the carriage. An ingenious design, especially for an owner with long legs.
Had he sent the servants to the other coach merely to be able to stretch his legs? He climbed in and did stretch his legs out. “A more comfortable arrangement, my lady. Don’t you agree?”
She just might scream. “I was not particularly cramped, my lord, though it is a useful feature for a coach.”
“My own design. What is more, those seats can be rearranged to make the entire carriage a bed.”
She glanced at him sharply, but managed to resist any further reaction. “So,” she said as the coach rolled out of the inn yard, “is that your sole reason for the change, my lord? To stretch your legs?”
“Not at all. We must rehearse you for your role in London.”
Thank heavens she’d said or done nothing to reveal the way her mind had run! She gathered her composure. “I do believe I know how to act the lady without practice, my lord.”
“But can you maintain it under fire? What do you do, for example, when the king tells you that women are put on this earth to serve men and bear their children, and nothing more?”
Diana felt her jaw tense, but she inclined her head. “Sire, I think women blessed who achieve such a happy situation.”
“So,” he said, his voice changing a little to a sharper, higher pitch, presumably in imitation of King George, “you wish to marry, Lady Arradale?”
She fluttered her lashes. “What woman would not wish to marry, sire, if she could find a man worthy of her true regard?”
“And in what direction does your inclination lie, my lady? What? What?”
She stared at him. “What? What?”
His lips twitched. “A mannerism of his. What would you answer?”
Diana thought. “Sire,” she said, lowering her head again, “my inclination lies toward a man of courage, honor, and strength.”
“A soldier, then, what?”
“Not only soldiers are brave, sire. A man of intelligence, with an understanding of the world. Someone able to advise me on my many responsibilities, but also kind and gentle, and considerate of all. One who will love me to the exclusion of all others. Especially that,” she said, looking up at him. “I require a husband who will be as absolutely faithful to me as I will be to him.”
In his own voice, the marquess asked, “You think you are setting an impossible standard? Brand will be that kind of husband to Rosa.”
“I had not finished, my lord.”
“Ah, continue.”
“I require a husband, sire, who will not need me to act a docile part, not protest at my determination, or try to restrict my actions.”
His brows rose. “And that, of course, is why we are going to spend today in rehearsal.”
She realized with annoyance that indeed she had fallen out of her role. “I would not say that to the king.”
“And a drunkard will give up brandy tomorrow.”
“I am not addicted to independence and power.”
“Are you not?”
“No more than you!”
“But for me, Lady Arradale, it is permitted.”
She resisted the urge to protest the unfairness of it. As he’d said before, that would be childish.
“So,” he continued, “when the king inquires about the state of your estates and affairs, what will you say?”
“I am able to explain them, I assure you.”
He shook his head. “No, Lady Arradale, you profess ignorance and confusion.”
“But then he will feel justified in imposing a man on me to manage them!”
“He will feel justified in that anyway. Any sign of manly expertise will only alarm him further.”
She turned to face forward again. “You’re right. I can’t do this.”
His fingers touched her cheek, turned her to face him again. “I believe that is where we started. Now, let’s try again …”
By evening, as they left Ware for the last stage to London, Diana was worn out. She was ready to hate her taskmaster, even though she saw that he had at times lightened the lessons and practices with humor. The stressful day had been even longer than expected, because of a loose wheel pin which had required a stop at a village wheelwright.
Beneath irritation and exhaustion, however, ran fear. If the marquess had planned to teach her that she faced a grueling time, that she could fail and plunge into disaster, he had succeeded.
In the ruddy light of the setting sun, she put a hand to her weary head. “My lord, I think you wish quite desperately to marry me.”
He was lounging back, but she thought perhaps he looked as tired as she. “Why would you think that, Lady Arradale?”
“You are close to convincing me that I cannot do this. If that’s true, I might as well abandon the effort now, and throw myself on your mercy.”
“You have more fighting spirit than that.”
She turned to look out of the window at the intense pink of the sky. “But you have succeeded in teaching me that I must not fight.”
“There are many kinds of battles, and different strategies. And weapons beyond the imagining of ordinary souls.”
She rolled her head back. “You think me extraordinary?”
“Don’t beg for compliments.” But his tired eyes were warm.
“I need some.”
She realized then that they had reached a different place during this grueling day. Not friendship exactly. Perhaps camaraderie? Certainly all barriers of formality had gone.
That could be dangerous, but she was too exhausted to care.
“You are without doubt extraordinary,” he said. “That, after all, is our problem.”
She laughed. “Could you not, for a moment, allow me to be extraordinary in a desirable way?”
“That was my precise meaning.”
She stared at him, throat constricting.
He reached out and drew the knuckle of one finger down the line of her jaw. “It does no good to ignore it. Better a battle faced. Yes, I desire you—strength, honor, courage, and all. However”—he took his hand away—“I am well skilled at resisting temptation.”
She captured that hand. “So am I, which is why we don’t have to resist everything. Kiss me.”
His hand lay lax in her grasp. “You know that would be most unwise.”
“Do I? Explain it to me.”
“Have you never experienced a kiss that demands more, much more?”
She shivered. “Perhaps …”
“I think not.”
“Why?”
“If you had, you would not risk it now.”
“You have?”
“You think me made of ice?”
Of course he had, and doubtless surrendered, too. It would be permitted, for a man. “I cannot endure this … incompletion,” she whispered.
“The ordeal is nearly over. After tomorrow we will see each other only occasionally. There will be distractions. Others.”
Sappho, she thought with a poisonous burst of spite. Had the woman really been on her way north?
“Where do I sleep tonight?”
“At Malloren House. But not,” he added, “in adjoining rooms.”
There was a tease in it, and a warning. “Then there is little danger, is there? In a kiss now?”
“My dear Lady Arradale, we are alone
in a closed carriage. It would be perilous.”
“My control must be greater than yours, then. It does not seem so perilous to me.” She shifted, his hand still in hers, and leaned lightly against him raising her head. “I promise on my honor not to let you ravish me, my lord.”
Hands still joined, his finger traced her lips. “You are frighteningly naive.”
Dalliance. One step above flirtation. One step below seduction.
“Then educate me,” she said.
His eyes seemed surprisingly dark. Perhaps it was the shadowing effect of the setting sun, but she didn’t think so. “You do need to recognize the fire with which you so foolishly play …” He freed his fingers and lightly cupped her head, lowering his lips.
She had been kissed in many ways—with mashing passion, and tentative sucking; with intent to impress, and with frantic hope of passing muster. She suddenly felt, however, that she had never experienced a true kiss. A simple kiss, as direct, as honest as a joining of loving hands.
Breath stealing, mind dazzling, soul shaking in its simplicity, power, and connection.
Her lids fluttered open and she stared at him. “What was that?”
A stupid question.
The answer was: a kiss.
But he did not say a kiss. He said, “That was our kiss. Do you understand now?”
She understood that she might be sick with the force of the changes shuddering inside her. “I understand that I want more.”
“My point, I believe.” He put her gently from him, back into her corner of the carriage.
She opened her mouth to protest, but then closed it. She couldn’t sort through all this now, but yes, at last she understood the forces with which they contended. “How long have you known?” she asked.
“Since I rubbed your feet.”
“We could be lovers.” It burst through all her attempts to contain it.
He shook his head. “This is a fire that can never burn tamely. It will consume. We must each guard our flame, and never let them join.”
She covered her face with her hands. Two flames in separate glass lamps. For eternity.
She would not protest. Not now. Perhaps if she thought about it, she could find a way. Or find a way back to the safer shore she had so tempestuously abandoned. A place to live for the rest of her life in some sort of peace without him.
Without him.
She lowered her hands to speak, to protest, and found he was looking away. Out of the coach.
That the coach had halted.
For a moment she thought it an illusion of her disordered mind. Then that he’d stopped the coach to get out. To leave her.
But she heard one of the outriders saying, “There’s something wrong with the horses, my lord.”
Chapter 14
The marquess opened the door and stepped down. Diana followed. The six horses drawing the coach were standing, heads drooping, looking almost asleep. The coachman and groom were down studying them.
“What is it?” the marquess asked, but Diana saw that he was glancing around.
The French? All senses snapping to the alert, she too studied the countryside. A fallow field to the right, with a church spire in the distance. A coppice to their left which could conceal any number of enemies. The wide road stretched ahead some distance, empty. Behind, however, it curved, and she could not see very far. Apart from singing birds and raucous crows, and the occasional low of cattle, there was no sound.
They were pushing on to London after the delay and so were a little late on the road. They could not expect a lot of traffic to pass by. However, the baggage coach should be right behind.
She turned back again.
Where was it?
She started to go to one of the outriders to question him, then changed her mind and leaned back into the coach to extract her pistol case from her valise. She’d felt strange about bringing her pistols with her, loaded, on this well-guarded journey, but now she gave thanks. She slipped them into her two pockets, then took the larger ones from the holsters by the door. The custom-made ones he’d used in their contest. Once sure they were loaded and primed she approached the outrider.
He had his own pistols out.
“What happened to the servants’ coach?” she asked.
“Don’t know, milady,” he said, only glancing at her before returning to his vigilant surveillance of the area. “They dropped back a bit over the past mile.”
The same problem with the horses? She went to where the marquess was talking to the coachman. “Yew?” she asked.
He turned to her, taking the pistols she offered without comment. “Quite likely. The symptoms fit.”
It warmed her that he only glanced at the guns, that he trusted her to have checked them, but this situation was chilling.
Yew was a leaf that horses found tasty, but which put them into a deadly stupor. No inn would have yew near its stableyard.
“The outriders’ horses seem fine,” she said, taking one pistol out of her pocket to have it ready.
“They didn’t change in Ware.” He glanced at her. “You think we should ride them?”
“It is a thought. But it isolates us.”
“Yet I don’t relish sitting here waiting for darkness to fall.”
Indeed, in the past minutes the sun had sunk lower, turning the whole sky a burning red and lengthening the shadows of the nearby trees. The groom and coachman were hurriedly freeing the swaying horses from their harnesses, but one was already down on its knees. “Poor creatures,” Diana said.
“It’s a peaceful death, all in all. Warner,” he said to the nearest outrider, “ride to the next inn for transport. All speed.”
The man spurred off at a gallop and the marquess turned to her. “Get into the coach, Diana.”
She looked up at him. “That’s the first time you’ve used my name.”
He was scanning the countryside now. “It seemed a shame not to.”
“I’m only getting in the coach if you come with me.”
He glanced down. “You just want your wicked way with me.”
“True, but at the moment I want you safe.”
“I prefer to be out here.”
She stepped right up against him. “Then I am a limpet.”
“Don’t be foolish. Do you suppose they would hesitate to kill you if you give them no choice?”
He took danger so coolly, so she matched his tone. “It might make them pause.”
When he frowned and put out a hand on her arm, she said, “You will find it hard to remove me by force, and harder still to keep me away. So, what do I call you?”
“Master?” he asked shortly, but then added, “If you wish, you may call me Bey.”
“I wish.”
With a smile that seemed ridiculous in the situation, she returned to looking out at the eerily peaceful evening countryside. It wasn’t eerie except in being completely unthreatening. Insects buzzed among the long grass and wildflowers by the road, and everywhere birds chirped and sang.
She heard a distant cowbell, and the warning bark of a dog. Noisy crows swooped about their nests in the coppice, and somewhere nearby a skylark sang with startling purity.
She thought of the invisible village that must cluster around that church spire. People there were doubtless going about their ordinary lives, unaware of drama close at hand. A movement caught her alert eye, but it was only a rabbit hopping up onto the road ahead and scampering over.
Everything was tranquil, even the dying horses. The horses, however, could not have eaten yew by accident.
She slid around so she stood back to back with him, she looking ahead, he behind. The groom and coachman were still attending to the poor horses, but the remaining outrider sat still and watchful, pistols in hand.
Pressing against his back—Bey’s back—she regretted days of doubt and restraint. What if they died here? What a waste it would be.
Then she heard it. Hooves.
Wheels.
From the way they’d come.
She was facing the wrong way and shifted to look, flexing her fingers around the pistol.
It could just be the servants.
“It is, isn’t it?” she whispered, relaxing a little as the coach appeared around the bend, coming at a normal brisk trot.
“It would appear so. Delayed, but not suffering our problem.” He kept his pistol in hand, however, but down, against his body. Tensing again, she put hers in the concealment of her wide skirts.
“Miller,” the marquess said to the outrider, “who comes?”
Heart pounding, dry mouthed, Diana watched the slowing vehicle. She couldn’t see who sat inside, and had no way of recognizing the two men on the coach. The outrider would.
“The second coach, milord.” Then he raised his pistol. “But—”
Two flames, then explosions of sound.
The outrider cried out, fell back, tumbled off—
Diana tumbled to the earth beneath the marquess’s hand as she heard something smash into the coach behind them. Another crack and a third pistol ball ricocheted off the ground in front of them spraying dirt so they both flinched.
She had her pistol pointing forward by then and cocked. She sighted without elegance, firing at the open window of the coach. Almost simultaneously, the marquess did the same.
Someone cried out.
A moment to take breath, to haul out the other pistol, to glance around. Their coachman and groom hiding behind horses. Outrider on the ground. Dead?
The marquess fired into the coach and another cry said someone had been hit. How many were there? And how many guns? He’d fired his two. She had one shot left.
She stared at the coach window, ready to kill.
Then a movement to the side swung her attention away.
The coach’s horses were panicked, and the coachman there was having to work full out to hold them in, to try to keep the coach in place. The groom, however, half hidden by his bulk, was carefully aiming a long musket at the marquess.
At Bey.
The coachman pretty well blocked all sight of the man with the musket. Elbows on the ground, Diana sighted anyway, making herself take a precious second to steady, to find that place that Carr always directed her to. She had only one shot between now and a terrible loss.