by Mary Balogh
“I have seen it,” he said. “I have even sat inside it a time or two. Are you wanting a word with me, Miss Westcott? I would have expected it to be the last thing you would desire.”
“I thought perhaps we ought to talk,” she said, “rather than tiptoe about each other for the next few days, either pretending that the other does not exist or else pretending that Harry did not say what he said. I could wring his neck.”
“You would have to stand in line,” he said grimly. “I was prepared to do the tiptoeing. But you are probably right. Let us go and talk, then. Good God!”
The exclamation was occasioned by Beauty’s decision at the very moment when Abigail had started down the steps to shake herself dry. There was a considerable amount of her to shake.
“I was beyond range,” she assured him not quite truthfully, laughing just a bit, when the dog had finished.
She led the way east along the terrace and around to the back of the house, where a graveled path had been made across the east lawn and through a grove of trees to the clearing beyond where the round wood and glass summerhouse stood. It was at the top of a gradual slope so that there was indeed a panoramic view to the south.
A low-backed, leather-cushioned bench was built around the inside wall. It was a private place to come with a book—or a companion with whom one wished to have an uninterrupted conversation. Although perhaps they would say no more to each other here than they could have said on the steps outside the house.
“It was unpardonable of Harry to say what he did,” Abigail began when they had seated themselves, some distance between them. Beauty had settled on the floor for a nap in a shaft of what was bound to be very temporary sunshine. “But have you considered marrying again as a way of convincing a court to return your daughter to you?”
There was a lengthy silence. What he had or had not considered was, of course, none of her business. But he had confided in her this morning, quite unbidden, and he had repeated that confidence to Harry this afternoon. He could not expect them to remain mute and unconcerned.
“I did not have a happy marriage,” he said curtly at last. “I am not likely to wish to repeat the experience.”
Frankly, she was not surprised. He was a hard and dour man. And a very silent man most of the time. She did not envy any woman who chose to marry him. She knew nothing about his late wife, but . . . Well, just that. She knew nothing.
“Is that perhaps an unreasonable attitude?” she asked. “My mother had a long and unhappy marriage—or supposed marriage—to my father, but she is extremely happy now with Marcel. My cousin Elizabeth had a miserable first marriage but is very happy in her second. Why would you assume that if you married again you would be as unhappy as you were the first time?”
Perhaps because it had been his fault. Perhaps because . . . Had he been rough or violent with his wife? Such men surely did not change.
“Why even talk of happiness or unhappiness,” he asked her, “when, if I followed Harry’s suggestion, my sole purpose in marrying a second time would be to get my daughter back? It would be insulting to the woman.”
“Why?” she asked. “You would be choosing a mother for your daughter as well as a wife for yourself. Presumably just anyone would not do. You would choose with care. Where is the insult in that?”
“You are wrong in one assumption,” he said. “I would be choosing only a mother for Katy. Or, rather, a woman upon whom a judge might look favorably as a mother. And what would happen if it did not work and I still lost custody of my child? I would be stuck with the wife and she would be stuck with me with no reason for being together except a nuptial service and a signature in a register that would bind us for life.”
“That is a very despairing attitude,” she told him.
“Or a realistic one,” he said. “I have little to recommend me to a judge, Miss Westcott. I am fully aware of that.”
He was right, she thought. However had he come to marry the daughter of a general, who also apparently had a title if his wife was Lady Pascoe? If it came to a matter of power and influence, as it well might, his position would be very weak indeed.
“What is your home like?” she asked.
He turned his head and looked narrow eyed at her. “It is called a cottage,” he said. “Actually it is larger than the sort of home that description calls to mind. Yet it is not quite a manor, I suppose.”
She was surprised. However had he acquired it? Had it come with his marriage? A wedding gift, perhaps, from her parents? It seemed unlikely. How did he maintain it? She waded all the way into impolite inquisitiveness.
“Do you have money?” she asked him.
The narrow-eyed look lasted longer this time, and she was very aware of his size, of his facial scar, of his masculinity. She was close to being suffocated by it, in fact. She ought to have opened a few of the windows before sitting down. She fully expected that he would rip up at her.
“I have money,” he said softly. “Did you imagine I was still a penniless urchin?”
“I did not imagine anything,” she said, feeling the heat in her cheeks. “I did not know. It is why I asked.”
And then the ripping up came after all—in a quiet voice that was somehow worse than a bellow would have been.
“You did not explain,” he said, “that you were inviting me here to interrogate me, Miss Westcott. I thought it was to clear the air after Harry invited us to marry each other. I feel as though I am being interviewed for employment. As your husband, perhaps.”
She closed her eyes and swallowed. If her cheeks did not burst into flames, it would be very surprising.
“No,” she said.
“What, then?” he asked her.
She opened her eyes and forced herself to look at him. As she expected, he was hard-jawed, cold-eyed, and very clearly angry despite the softness of his voice. Well, she was a bit angry too. How dare he accuse her of . . . interviewing him?
“I do not know,” she said. “I wanted to clear the air. And perhaps help a bit. I seem to have made matters worse.”
He got to his feet abruptly and went to stand close to the windows at the other side of the summerhouse, gazing out over the fields beyond the village. Beauty scrambled to a sitting position, her tail thumping the floor. The break in the clouds that had allowed that shaft of sunshine through had closed up again. It was raining lightly. Abigail could hear it drumming against the roof.
“I do not need help,” he said, “though I must thank you for listening to my ravings this morning. And apologize for them. I do not need your well-meant offer of help, Miss Westcott. I will deal with this myself.”
How? But she stopped herself from asking the question aloud.
There was a lengthy silence that Abigail did not know how to break. Nor could she think of a way of decently ending this tête-à-tête. He was standing tall, his hands clasped behind him, his booted feet slightly apart, and it seemed to her as though some of the air had been sucked from the summerhouse. She felt as though it were filled instead with his very masculine presence.
Whyever had she invited him here?
“Do you wonder why she married me?” he asked, as though he had heard her thoughts of a few minutes ago. “Me, a scarred and ugly gutter rat, when she was the lovely, pampered daughter of General Sir Edward Pascoe and could have had her pick of several dozen sons of lords?”
Ah, he was a baronet, then, the general. Abigail said nothing. She did not believe he expected an answer.
“She liked to be treated roughly—at certain times,” he said. “It was why she married me, though I did not understand that at the time. She knew who I was and where I had come from. It excited her when it ought to have repelled her. My appearance excited her—big and rough and tough. The same for my reputation as an officer—and the fact that I had once been a sergeant. She did not want to be a lady, she told me. She
was fresh out of school and bored with being genteel. She wanted to wallow in the muck and the gutter. With me.”
Abigail sat very still, appalled. There was such a contrast between the softness of his voice and the viciousness of the words he was speaking.
He half turned and looked at her over his shoulder. His face was hard and harsh and a bit frightening. He did not look away. And she could not. She shook her head slightly.
“Do you tell me this,” she asked him, “because you believe it is the way I see you? Rough and tough? Belonging in the muck and the gutter?”
He did not answer. He continued to look at her.
“If it is,” she said, “I am insulted.”
Still he said nothing, and she got to her feet, intending to leave. But she stood still instead, frowning at him. It was not a large summerhouse. There was no great distance between them. Beauty had moved away to lie down again beneath the bench.
“I am not . . . titillated by your humble roots, Lieutenant Colonel Bennington,” she said. “Nor do I see you as defined by them. I am not excited by your size or the . . . harshness of your face or your scar. I am not your first wife.”
His expression had changed only enough to accommodate a frown.
“Neither,” she said, “am I applying for the position of second wife.”
“I am sorry,” he said, turning more fully to face her. And when she did not immediately reply, he said it again. “I am sorry.”
“So am I,” she said.
She took a step forward. She had intended to move toward the door, but the step had also taken her closer to him. And she stopped and looked up at him. She drew breath to say something but could not remember what it was, if she had ever known. She bit her lip instead, and when his hands cupped the tops of her arms and her shoulders, she took another step forward and he kissed her.
The shock of it robbed her of both breath and thought for a few moments. She had never been kissed before. She had never known quite what to expect. But not this, surely. Not from him, at least. He kissed softly, with slightly parted lips that moved over her own, enveloping them, warming them, tasting them while his hands held her shoulders, but not in a viselike grip. She might have moved away at any moment. But his hands held her firmly enough to keep her a little away from him. She felt his kiss with the whole of herself anyway. She felt it in every part of her being, a warmth, an aliveness, a yearning, a something else to which it was impossible to put a name.
By the time he released her she felt very close to tears.
His face still looked like granite.
She turned to the door and opened it.
“Beauty,” she heard him say, “sit.”
She made her way out of the summerhouse and back along the path toward the house in the drizzling rain.
It was not rain she felt on her cheeks, however. The moisture was too warm.
Eleven
Beauty, on her feet, tail waving, looked from the door to Gil. She whined once.
“Tell me,” he said, addressing her, “that what just happened did not really happen.”
She could offer him no such assurance.
“Could you not lie for once in your life?” he added.
Apparently not.
He sat down on the bench, set his elbows on his spread knees, and pushed his fingers into his hair. He rested his forehead against the heels of his hands. His dog sat at his feet and looked up at him, her head cocked slightly to one side.
What the devil . . . What the devil had that been about?
Had he just doubled the complications in his already complicated life?
“What is it about Abigail Westcott?” he asked aloud.
Beauty thumped her tail.
The first time, and the second time too, he had set eyes upon the woman he had disliked her intensely. She had symbolized for him all that he most detested about ladies—ladies, as opposed to women—dainty and delicate and vaporish, yet cold and haughty with a distinct air of entitlement. And despite the irregularities of her birth she was a lady. With a capital L. He had avoided her all he could during the week when her family was here and had been horribly dismayed when he discovered she was staying on after they left. Since then he had avoided her when he could and treated her with cool courtesy when he could not.
Yet he had told her more about himself than he had told anyone else in his life, even Caroline. Even his lawyer and that chaplain on the boat back to France. She liked to be treated roughly—at certain times. She wanted to wallow in the muck and the gutter. With me.
Good God! Had he really told her those things?
Abigail Westcott showed no sign of wanting any rough play. She had not even touched him when he had touched her. Even her lips had not pushed back against his, though they had softened and trembled slightly. He would wager a bundle that had been her first kiss.
She had not pulled away from him either. Or shown any sign of horror or revulsion. She had looked briefly into his face afterward and then left. She had even closed the door quietly behind her.
He raised his head and let his hands hang down between his knees. The clouds were breaking up again. The fields and hedges that stretched into the distance in a patchwork of greens and browns were dappled with sunshine and shade.
Damn Harry!
He had sat down earlier at the table in his room and written out a two-column list of all the points that would be in his favor and all those that would be in General and Lady Pascoe’s favor if there were a court case to decide Katy’s fate. He had omitted the possible criminal charges each might bring against the other, assuming they were just so much posturing on the part of the lawyers, a ploy to convince their respective clients that they were tough negotiators and worth every penny of their exorbitant fees. The only points he could think of for his column were the facts that he was her father, that he had a home to which to take her, and that he had the wherewithal to support her. Three points, reasonably solid. He did add after thinking about it that he had never deserted her or consented to have her taken to the home of her grandparents, but that sounded a bit whiny and he had crossed it through.
There were ten points in the general’s column, all of them perfectly sound. But really the list was pointless. For everything boiled down to the fact that the general and his wife had birth and power and influence on their side while he had none of the three. Most telling of all, they had Katy. The power of possession.
He desperately needed something to help redress the imbalance. Would a wife do it? If he had the fatherhood, the home, the money, and the mother to offer in his effort to sway a judge—assuming that the matter went to court, that was—would he be granted custody? Or, even better, would Katy’s grandparents cede the custody to him without a battle if he married a wife of whom they must approve?
Someone like Abigail Westcott, who was the perfect lady? But no, she was not quite perfect, was she? Her birth was illegitimate. Besides, they were unlikely to approve of anyone who would be supplanting Caroline, their only child, upon whom they had doted.
It was hopeless. The whole damnable situation was hopeless.
Beauty scrambled to her feet and nudged at his hands with her cold, wet nose. He patted her head and straightened out her ears with his thumbs, even the one tip that would never stay straight.
“I am not really considering it, anyway, Beaut,” he said. “And even if I were, she most certainly is not.”
Beauty woofed.
What he should do now, Gil thought as he got to his feet to return to the house, and what he must do—no more procrastinating—was leave here. Go home. See what the house looked like after all this time. See what it felt like to be back there.
He would leave tomorrow or the next day at the latest.
At dinner that evening, however, Harry announced that he was ready to go riding.
�
�Do not say a word, Ab,” he said, addressing his sister. “I will not be deterred.”
“I had no intention of saying a word,” she replied. “Or ten words. Or even a hundred. I know how pointless it would be. Besides, I did not stay here to fuss you, Harry.”
“But I will need you to ride with me, Gil,” Harry said with a rueful grin at his friend. “Not to hold my hand, but to stop any of the grooms from insisting upon doing so. I could not bear to have one of them riding along beside me like a dashed nursemaid, waiting for me to topple off. You can scrape up the pieces if I should do that.”
“You would never be able to hold your head up again,” Gil said. “Assuming you had a head left to hold up, that is. I will do my best to keep you in one piece and up in the saddle. No jumping of hedges or gates, though.”
“Good Lord, no,” Harry agreed. “Not for the first hour, anyway.”
So, Gil thought, he was stuck here for at least a few more days, perhaps a week. Harry needed him.
* * *
• • •
It was two days later before Harry actually went for his first ride. It rained steadily for much of those two days, clearing up only late in the afternoon of the second day. On the third morning, however, the sun was beaming down from a clear blue sky with not a cloud in sight.
Abigail worried, of course. She worried that Harry was not strong enough to ride yet. She worried that the horse he had purchased was too powerful for him in his weakened state, though she knew that one of the grooms had been riding it, breaking it in so to speak, making sure the horse had no unexpected quirks that might be a danger to Harry, who had not ridden for almost two years. She worried that he would overtax his strength and ride too far.
She held her tongue, however.
She walked out to the stables with him and Lieutenant Colonel Bennington. She had not avoided the latter during the past two days. There would be too much awkwardness in the maneuvering doing that would have involved. But she had thought of going back to London. Except that she did not want to go. And why should she allow herself to be driven from her own home by a few impulsive words from Harry and a brief kiss from his friend?