His head snapped around, his gaze tangling with hers, and for a moment, she saw it all in his eyes, all of his rebellious pride, all of his angry, tortured self-loathing. He had such a striking face, the cheekbones wide and flaring, the eyes beautiful and brilliant and frightening. So very frightening. Wordlessly, she kneed her horse forward, leaving him to follow or not. For one wild moment, she actually hoped he would not.
Except that he could no more disobey an order than she could ride, alone and unattended, beyond the castle's drive. In single file, they trotted out the yard, toward the road.
She sent her horse at a canter down the sunlit, rutted road. A rich aroma of warm earth and sweet, growing things rose from the fields of wheat and pasturage beside her. The rushing wind battered her cheeks until they stung and whipped her hair loose from beneath the low crown of her beaver hat, but she didn't care. She felt the mare's strength surging beneath her, becoming a part of her, the great muscles bunching, hooves pounding in a joyous, primitive rhythm of speed and freedom.
But no matter how hard she rode, she found she couldn't forget the Irishman, there, behind her. He kept intruding on her thoughts, on her peace. Awareness of his nearness shadowed her, the persistent drumming of his roan's hoofbeats chasing her, so that she urged the mare on faster, and faster.
The track began to climb as they reached the hills that separated the fertile, cultivated valley from the sea. Here, fields of wheat and barley and hay gave way to open forest, the great beech and blue gums casting patterns of dusky shadow and golden spring sunlight across the narrow lane, the air smelling heavily of eucalyptus oil and damp earth. Reluctantly, she slowed the mare to a walk. Only, without the distractions of noise and speed, she found herself more and more aware of the man who rode silently behind her. Twice, she barely stopped herself from glancing over her shoulder at him. She found it increasingly unsettling to think of him watching her, when she could not see him. Abruptly, she checked the mare and waited for him to ride up abreast of her.
He cast her a quizzical sideways glance, which she ignored. "So, Mr. Gallagher," she said, reaching down to pat the mare's sweat-stained withers, "tell me. Have you tried to ride Finnegan's Luck yet?"
She slanted a look up at him from beneath the brim of her beaver hat. He had his gaze fastened on the winding dirt track ahead, but she saw the creases beside his mouth deepen, as if with an inner smile. "Not yet."
"Not yet? You astonish me, Mr. Gallagher. Perhaps, unlike your cousin Mr. Finnegan, you have some aversion to hitting the dust first thing in the morning?"
"Aye, that's the way of it," he said, putting on the Irish for her, so that she had to smile.
"I haven't heard precisely how you intend to cure Lucky of his famous habit. You did tell Old Tom you have an idea, didn't you?"
"I've a few notions." He tilted his head back, his gaze lifting to the rosellas that flitted, chirping and squawking, through the branches of the black wattle above them. "But I'll not be gettin' any closer to him than a longeing rein for a while yet."
She watched him, still watching the parrots. He had several days' worth of beard darkening his cheeks, and his hair was too long and ragged, so that with his head tilted back like that it hung to his shoulders. He looked rough and dark and dangerous. Yet she knew that he was not, entirely, what he seemed. What he liked to appear. "Why do you do that?" she asked suddenly.
He brought his gaze back to her face. "Do what?"
"Put on the Irish the way you do. You're an educated man. I hear it in your speech when you forget to watch yourself. Yet you deliberately make yourself sound like ..." She hesitated.
"Like a bog-trotting Irishman?" His voice grated harshly, his eyes narrowing to glittering green slits. "Isn't that what we all are to you lot? Just so many ignorant, potato-grubbing Irish—good for nothing but being conquered and ruled by Britannia's fine sons?"
She sucked in a quick, startled breath. He swung his head away, his gaze focused once more on the road ahead. "Besides, it's not put on," he added more quietly, the soft Irish lilt still there, even if no longer exaggerated. "It's the way the men and women I grew up around speak—the fisherman and farmers, the shopkeepers and day laborers. To them, your English is as foreign as your queen, something imposed on them by outsiders. In their own homes, amongst their own kind, they still speak their own language."
He drew the long length of the reins through his free hand, the leather straps twining over his bare fingers, for he had no riding gloves to protect his work-hardened hands, as she did. "My mother, she always spoke the Gaelic at home. She loves Ireland as fiercely as she loves each of her own children, you see, and she was determined to make sure we all learned its language. She wanted us to be able to teach it to our children, and to our children's children."
"And your father?"
An echo of a smile touched his lips. "My father? Oh, he's a patriot, but he's also a practical man. So while my mother worked on our Gaelic, he concentrated on our English. He always said keeping traditions alive is one thing, but a man's family needs to eat, and a Dublin barrister can't afford to sound like one of your bog Irish."
She could no longer look at his face. Dropping her gaze, she found herself staring at his hands instead. They held the reins so lightly, so effortlessly. He had such beautiful, almost delicately shaped hands, even battered and scarred as they were by brutal, endless labor. He'd taken off his jacket in the midday sun and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, exposing strong, tanned forearms and fine-boned wrists marred by ugly rings of scars.
She'd seen scars like that all of her life. Irons did that to a man. Iron shackles worn month after month as a man toiled in the heat and rain. The flesh chafed and festered, sometimes wearing down to the very bone. Even after the chains were struck off, their marks remained, a shameful, telltale legacy of past servitude. He would have scars like that on his ankles, too, she thought. So many scars.
"Is that what you were, before?" she asked quietly. "A Dublin barrister?"
He shook his head, a smile that was more mean than amused tightening his lips." 'Tis what I was aiming for, brave- hearted, idealistic young lad that I was. I was going to fight for Ireland's freedom in the courts and in Parliament, using words and grand ideas, not guns and cudgels."
So what happened? she wanted to ask, but didn't. Her throat felt tight, her eyes stinging as if with unshed tears, although that was ridiculous, for why should she feel like crying? She wished she hadn't talked to him about his past at all. She didn't want to think about the life this man had lived before, back in Ireland. About the parents and brothers and sisters he'd been forced to leave behind. She didn't want to have to think of him as anything other than what he was now: a convict groom.
Her gaze fixed on the road through the dry forest ahead, she kneed the mare forward and left him to ride behind her, as was proper.
The breeze hit them, strong and laden with brine as they came out of the forest at a heath-covered bluff overlooking the distant sea. Sunshine sparkled off shifting waves of a deep, beautiful aquamarine, dazzled with glimmers of silver by the brilliant light.
From here they could look down, to the right, on the broad sweep of the town of Blackhaven Bay, with its neat stone houses and shops, its weathered gray docks and warehouses, its military barracks and whaling tryworks strung out along a two-mile stretch of shingled beach. Just offshore, in the deep, calm waters of the bay itself, a small fleet of fishing boats and coastal ketches rode at anchor beside two great whalers, their bare, idle masts rocking back and forth against the clear blue sky.
Only the cradling arm of the wooded headland known as Last Chance Point separated this gentle bay from Shipwreck Cove, the deeply cut inlet to the north. If a ship anchored too far out in Blackhaven Bay, and if the wind was blowing a gale and the riptides running, the unwary could be swept out around the headland and onto the rocks at the base of the jagged, blackened cliffs that plunged into the waters on the far side of the cove. But on this bright sprin
g morning, the cove lay peaceful and serene below them, the rocks hidden by the tide that rolled softly in to break on the sandy curve of the beach.
It was here, at the top of the bluff, that the road they followed divided into three, the main road continuing to the right, to Blackhaven Bay. A smaller track took off to their left, winding down to the cove itself, while another path, little traveled and partially overgrown, continued on to a small, whitewashed, rose-covered cottage just visible at the tip of the rough headland that jutted out before them, separating the cove from the bay.
The black tossed its head impatiently as Jessie drew up at the crossroads, her heart pulling her toward that windswept headland even as her common sense reminded her of the need to turn away, to the cove below. The thought of not visiting the cottage was insupportable, and yet, without Old Tom as her groom, she wondered how she would ever manage it.
"Sure then, but that looks like Shipwreck Cove, down there on our left," said the Irishman, straightening his legs and standing in the stirrups in an almost lazy kind of stretch.
"Thank you, Mr. Gallagher. I am aware of that," she snapped, then regretted it as she felt his gaze upon her, considering and dangerously shrewd.
"I know about your visits to the cottage on the headlands, if that's what's worrying you."
She started so violently her hands tightened on the reins, jerking at the bit in the mare's mouth hard enough to cause the confused horse to begin to back up. "Steady," she said, running a soothing hand over the mare's sweating withers. "Sorry, girl." Lifting her head, Jessie met Gallagher's hard, glittering stare, and somehow—somehow—managed to keep her voice calm and cool. "I beg your pardon, but I can't imagine what you're talking about."
"Genevieve Strzlecki," he said, not the least put off by Jessie's haughty demeanor. "The local Fallen Woman. She lives in splendid isolation in a cottage on that spit of land jutting out there. Every gently reared lad and lass in the area is forbidden to have anything to do with her, yet you've been visiting her regularly for years." He gave her that smile she didn't like, the one that flashed wide and handsome and did nothing to warm the penetrating cold of his eyes. "It's where you were originally plannin' to go this morning, wasn't it?"
CHAPTER NINE
Lucas watched her eyes widen in a stare of disbelief and alarm that gave way, almost at once, to a hot rush of anger. He saw her consider, briefly, an attempt at dissemblance. Knew, too, the instant she rejected it.
"How?" she demanded. "How could you know?" The pretty little white-stockinged mare began to dance sideways, neck arching, tail high. Miss Jesmond Corbett controlled the horse easily, her measured stare still fixed on Lucas's face. "Never say Old Tom told you."
He gave her a tight smile. "We have a saying in Ireland. Chan sgeul ruin a chluinneas triuir. Which means—"
"A story that three people hear is no secret," she finished for him.
He let his smile broaden. "Sure then, but you got that right enough."
She regarded him steadily, her magnificent blue eyes hidden by half-lowered lids. And then he decided perhaps he wasn't as good at reading her as he'd supposed, for he couldn't begin to imagine what she was thinking. Abruptly, she wheeled away from him and kneed the mare forward, up the overgrown track to the cottage, leaving him to bring the roan into step behind her.
They rode in silence, the horses' hooves making soft thumps in the deep humus of the little-traveled road, the stands of tall gums undergrown with sweet-smelling clematis and dogwood through which they passed casting deep shadows. He could hear the sea breaking in successive distant booms against the rocky cliffs of the headland before them and the soft cry of gulls drifting on the briny breeze. Tilting back his head, he scanned the sky, its deep blue contrasting vividly with the banks of clouds beginning to build on the horizon. Reluctantly, he brought his gaze back to the woman ahead of him.
She might be haughty and proud and typically, infuriatingly English, but a man would have to be half dead, Gallagher thought, not to admire the picture they made, the high-stepping, dainty black mare and the slim, gilt-haired woman on its back. She had an easy, natural seat in the saddle, her straight, relaxed body moving in effortless rhythm with the animal beneath. She wore a jaunty, low-crowned beaver hat with a black coque feather that curled beguilingly against the gleaming gold of her hair, while the jacket of her dark blue riding habit had been finished at the neck with an embroidered white collar that emphasized the translucent purity of her skin. He studied the strong line of her jaw and chin, watched the sweep of her dusky lashes against her pale cheekbones as she looked down, and knew a private coil of desire, unwanted and yet undeniable, deep within his being.
The absurdity of it, the impossible, wild longing of it, almost made him want to laugh. She was as inaccessible to him as the four winds of heaven, as the darkest unknown depths of the ocean. Warrick Corbett had to be some kind of a fool, Lucas thought, to have sent off this beautiful, very desirable young woman accompanied only by a hot-blooded young Irishman who hadn't known the tender touch of a woman's hand for three long years. But then, it was the usual practice. Sometimes Lucas wondered if the big landowners such as Warrick Corbett and Harrison Tate even realized their male servants were men, and not some strange species of near- eunuch, created for their convenience and having no life, no existence, no reality beyond their master's needs.
He could see the cottage now, low-roofed and rambling. With its roughly rendered walls, black-painted casement windows, and arching thatched roof, it looked as if it might have been spirited here from the midlands of England itself. Abruptly, Miss Jesmond Corbett reined in and wheeled to face him, the features beneath that cocky, low-crowned hat of hers set in proud, defiant lines. But the superb blue eyes were troubled. "Will you tell?"
He met her gaze squarely. "No."
Her chin came up, and he saw her slender white throat work as she swallowed. "Why not?"
Lucas rested his hand on his thigh, his head lifting as he turned to look out over the surging blue waves and small crescent of golden sand at the curve of the cove. In a high wind, with the tide running swift and unseen, Shipwreck Cove was said to be deadly. But on a calm day, this was the only safe outlet to the sea for a good fifty miles to the north or south of Blackhaven Bay. Lucas might find the idea of serving as groom to this haughty, vibrant, and damnably desirable young Englishwoman both galling and unnerving, but the truth was, he had his own reasons for wanting to get to know this area better.
He had heard about this cove just days after his arrival at the castle, and ever since then he had applied himself to learning as much as he could about the place. Except for this one cottage high on the headland, the cove was said to be uninhabited, the only other house in the area being a burned-out shell tucked into the rolling hills near the beach. It was said the ruin had been the scene of some terrible tragedy so shocking that most people avoided it, if they could. Which suited Gallagher just fine, since he figured the house must have had, once, its own dock. And a deserted dock was of considerable interest to a convict determined to escape his island prison.
But he wasn't about to tell her any of that. So, instead of answering her, he asked another question. "Why didn't Old Tom tell?"
"He's not the type."
He brought his gaze back to her face. And it occurred to him, looking at her, that even if he hadn't had his own reasons for wanting to visit Shipwreck Cove, he still wouldn't have betrayed her. "Neither am I," he said.
She stared at him, her eyes as dark and troubled as a stormy sea, those solemn, uncompromising brows of hers drawn together, in that way she had, by worried thoughts. She didn't trust him, of course. There was no reason she should. But she had little choice. He already knew her secret.
Humming softly to herself, Genevieve Strzlecki snipped a half-opened yellow bud from one of the climbing rose bushes that scrambled over the whitewashed, rendered walls of her cottage. They had to be hardy, those roses, to grow in the salt- laden, windy atmosphere of
the Point. Most of their energy went into simple survival, so that when they did somehow manage to produce a rose, she usually left it, as a tribute to their hardiness and perseverance. But this one she would take into the house with her. Sometimes, even an indomitable rose can provide company.
A faint, distant sound from below the garden brought her head up,.one hand lifting to anchor her straw hat against the breeze that always blew up from the sea. She turned her wrist automatically, as most gardeners will do, so that she touched the hat with only the back of her knuckles, for her palms and fingers were often stained with soil or the green, growing things of the earth. Once, years ago, on the Isle of Capri, she had held her bonnet just so, and a handsome, dark-haired man with burning eyes had whispered in her ear how beautiful she looked. How beautiful, and how desirable. She smiled at the memory. He had been French, she thought, or maybe Italian. She was no longer sure.
Once, she had been beautiful, beautiful and young, with a flowing golden mane of hair and skin of the smoothest, most translucent eggshell, sprinkled gently with cinnamon. Now she was old, with snow-white hair and deep laugh lines beside her eyes. But her age was something she remembered only when she looked in the mirror, or on the bad days in the deepest months of winter, when the wind howled up from the
South Pole and her bones ached when she slipped from her bed in the cold, gray hours of morning. Deep inside, in the core of her being, she was still the same Genevieve who had shocked them all, so many years ago.
Once, she had run away from everything she knew to be with the man she loved. Once, she had waltzed with kings and raced before the trade winds in the arms of her forbidden lover. Once, she had dressed in silks and satins and diamonds, and traveled the world. Now her world was reduced to this small whitewashed cottage with its peculiar collection of beloved objects and dozen resident cats, to the wind-tossed eucalyptuses and soaring black rocks of the headland, to the endless sea that stretched out eternal yet ever changing, as elemental and necessary to her continued existence as the air. Not that she minded the change in her circumstances. For as much as Genevieve had delighted in the candlelit dinners graced with silver and crystal, as much as she had luxuriated in the sumptuous feel of silks and fur-trimmed velvets against naked flesh, as much as she had enjoyed the hard- muscled, hard-driving men of her past, she loved this cottage, and the sea, and the life she had made for herself here. She had discovered early that what we want out of life can change; that the important thing is to learn to recognize or even simply just to admit what we really want, and then to have the courage to reach for it.
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