Indiscreet

by Mary Balogh

  There was a curious silence. Daphne was on her feet, clinging to the back of a chair.

  “Ah,” he said quietly. “I see there is no point in telling my story about being tossed from my horse’s back, is there?”

  “Rex,” Daphne said, her hand spread over her womb.

  “I am all right, Daphne,” he said. “A mere flesh wound in the arm. Nothing but a graze. But the fool of a physician insisted on the sling. I think it looks rather impressive.” He grinned.

  “If you only knew,” she said, “what we have been through. Waiting is the most abominable activity in this world, Rex. And women are called upon to do so much of it.”

  Catherine felt rather like a disembodied spirit observing the scene but not really present in it. She could neither move nor speak. But he turned to her then and came across the room to her. He went down on one knee in front of her chair and took her hands in his despite the sling. His right hand was colder than the left.

  “He will not trouble you or any other woman ever again, my love,” he said gently.

  “You killed him?” It was Daphne’s voice.

  “Yes,” he said.

  But the door had opened again and someone else came striding in. A moment later Daphne was crying noisily.

  “Oh, Clay,” she was saying. “Oh, Clay, you promised me after that dreadful Battle of Waterloo that I would never have to suffer this again.”

  “Yes, love,” he said. “I just heard. You were not at home. I guessed where you were especially after discovering that Catherine had been at the house. This excitement will do you no good, you know. It is to be home and to bed with you without further delay. Rex and Catherine need to be alone, anyway.”

  Catherine had not looked at them. Neither had Rex. They gazed only at each other, their hands clasped. After a minute or so there was silence in the room. Neither looked to be sure they were alone.

  She found her voice at last. “I could have endured having him in the world far more cheerfully than having you out of it,” she said.

  “Could you?” With his left hand he raised her right to his lips. “It had to be done, my love. I did it.”

  “There is no one to hear it,” she said. “It does not need to be said.” Her mind could seem to latch only onto trivialities.

  “To hear what?” He looked mystified.

  “‘My love,’” she said.

  “You are my love.” He was smiling at her. “Perhaps it is something you do not wish to hear, Catherine, but I plan to spend the next eternity or two earning the right to say it again and again. My love.” He kissed her hand again. “What? Tears? Is it quite that bad?”

  She bit her upper lip hard, but it was no good. Her face crumpled ignominiously and she hid it against his right shoulder. She jerked upright again when he noticeably winced.

  “If you love me,” she cried, “how could you have done something so stupid, stupid, stupid? I hate you. Do you think I wanted you dead just because of your foolish sense of honor? How could I have loved you if you were dead? How could I have told you when it was too late?”

  He was still smiling. She could see that with her clearing vision. “Catherine,” he said softly. “My love.”

  “All I could think of,” she said, “was that I had not told you.”

  “Told me what?” he asked her.

  “That I love you,” she said, and remembered to use his left shoulder this time.

  She looked up again when she could feel that there were unmistakably two arms about her. He had slipped the right one free of the sling.

  “To hell with it,” he said, grinning at her. “It was merely for theatrical effect anyway. So we find ourselves in a love match after all, do we?”

  She nodded, gazing into his eyes, realizing anew how close she had come this morning to losing him. A bullet had been fired at him and had hit him. She knew that the reality of that fact would haunt her for a long time to come.

  “And alone.” He drew her closer and set his lips to hers. “No one would dare enter unbidden, even though the door is unlocked. I am suddenly feeling decidedly amorous, my love. It comes after danger has passed, you know. Life reasserting itself, I suppose.”

  But even as he spoke the door was opened a crack from the outside by an unseen hand, and a mere second or two later an ecstatic little bundle hurled itself at them, barking loudly.

  “Down, sir,” Viscount Rawleigh said sternly.

  “Oh, Toby,” Catherine said, “you came home.”

  Toby sat down beside his new master, panting and thumping his tail on the carpet.

  “We are going to have to teach that terrier something about good manners,” Lord Rawleigh said.

  “No, we are not,” Catherine said. “I love him just as he is.”

  “Well,” he said, “perhaps I will try exerting my authority to more effect when it is a child we are discussing. And talking of discussions, shall we continue this one in your bedchamber?”

  “Your arm?” she said.

  “Is still attached to my shoulder and can still hold you,” he said. “Shall we go?”

  She nodded.

  But before either of them got to their feet, he kissed her very thoroughly. For both of them it was a kiss of uninhibited, unconditional love. A kiss full of awareness of the fact that the moment must be seized, that life is too short and unpredictable in its course for love to be delayed.

  “I am so glad,” she said during a momentary lull, caused by the necessity of breathing, “that for the merest moment once upon a time I mistook you for Claude.”

  “Mm,” he said. “For which error you are forgiven, my love—provided it does not happen again.”

  Toby rested his head on his outstretched paws, his eyes on them, and yawned loudly and contentedly.

  Dear Reader,

  For a number of years many of you have been telling me that you have read and loved Irresistible, Book 3 in the Horsemen trilogy, but cannot find the other two books. I know as a reader myself how annoying that can be when a series is involved, but yes, they have been out of print and it has been beyond my power to bring them back. That has now changed, to my great delight, and, almost twenty years after they were first published, all three books will be out again in 2016 with gorgeous new covers. Indeed, when I first saw the cover of Indiscreet, Book 1, I loved it so much that I told my editor I wanted to live in the cottage. Both she and my agent said they would join me there for tea and scones. Perhaps you will drop by too and enjoy the three stories, as I know readers did in the past.

  If you are familiar with my recent Survivors’ Club series, you will note the contrast in my treatment of men (and one woman) returning from war. There I chose to concentrate on the wounds, both physical and psychic, that the Napoleonic Wars caused my main characters. In the trilogy, however, I chose to tell the stories of four young cavalry officers (two of them are combined in Book 3) who have returned from war unscathed and eager to enjoy life to the full and forget about responsibility for a while. Life intervenes for them all, of course, and leads them through adversity to romance and the sort of happiness they had not anticipated. I hope you will enjoy reading or rereading their stories in these lovely new editions.

  Mary Balogh

  TURN THE PAGE FOR A LOOK AT THE SECOND BOOK IN MARY BALOGH’S BELOVED HORSEMEN TRILOGY,

  UNFORGIVEN

  AVAILABLE FROM THE BERKLEY GROUP IN JULY 2016.

  IT was a beautiful day for early December: crisply chill, it was true, but bright and sunny, nevertheless. The sun sparkled off the surface of the sea like thousands of diamonds, and the wind that so often whipped across the water to buffet the land and knife through its inhabitants was a mere gentle breeze today.

  The lady who sat at the top of the steep cliff, almost at its edge, in a slight grassy hollow of land that hid her from the road behind, clasped h
er arms about her knees and drew in deep breaths of the salt air. She felt soothed and invigorated both at the same time.

  Everything was about to change, but surely for the better. How could it be otherwise when she had thought herself beyond the age of marriage just two days ago—she was six-and-twenty years old—and was now awaiting the arrival of her future husband? She had told herself for the past several years that she had no wish to marry, that she was happy to live at Penwith Manor with her widowed mother, enjoying a freedom that most women never knew. But the freedom was illusory, and she had always known it. For longer than a year she had lived with insecurity and ignored it because there had been nothing she could do about it. She was a mere woman after all.

  Penwith Manor had belonged to her father and to his father before him and so on back through six generations. But on her father’s death it—and his baronet’s title—had passed to a distant cousin. In the fourteen months since her father’s death, she had continued to live there with her mother, but they had both been fully aware that Sir Edwin Baillie might at any moment wish to take up residence there himself or else sell it or lease it. What would become of them then? Where would they go? What would they do? Sir Edwin would probably not turn them out destitute, but they might have to move to a very small home with a correspondingly small income. It had not been a pleasant prospect.

  But now Sir Edwin had made his decision and had written a lengthy letter to Lady Hayes to announce his intention of taking a bride so that he might produce sons to secure his inheritance and to care for his own mother and three sisters in the event of his untimely passing. His intention was to solve two problems at once by marrying his third cousin once removed, Miss Moira Hayes. He would come to Penwith Manor within the week to make his offer and to arrange for their wedding in the spring.

  Miss Moira Hayes, he had seemed to assume, would be only too happy to accept his offer. And after the initial shock, the initial indignation over his taking her meek compliance for granted, Moira had had to admit that she was happy. Or if not exactly happy, then at least content. Accepting would be the sensible thing to do. She was six-and-twenty and living in precarious circumstances. She had met Sir Edwin Baillie once, soon after Papa’s death when he had come with his mother to inspect his new property. She had found him dull and somewhat pompous, but he was young—not much older than five-and-thirty at a guess—and respectable and passably good-looking even if not handsome. Besides, Moira told herself, looks were in no way important, especially to an aging spinster who had long outlived any dreams of romance or romantic love.

  She rested her chin on her knees and smiled rather ruefully down at the sea below the cliffs. Oh, yes, she had long outlived dreams. But then, so much had changed since her childhood, since her girlhood. So much had changed outside herself, within herself. She was now very ordinary, very dull, very respectable. She laughed softly. Yet she had never outlived the habit of going off by herself, though a respectable female had no business being alone outside her own home. This had always been a favorite spot. But it was a long time since she had last been here. She was not sure what had drawn her here today. Had she come to say good-bye to dreams? It was a somber thought.

  But it need not be a depressing one. Marriage with Sir Edwin would doubtless bring no real happiness with it, but then, it probably would bring no great unhappiness, either. Marriage would be what she made of it. Sir Edwin wanted children—sons. Well, so did she. Just two days ago, she had thought even that dream impossible.

  She tensed suddenly as a dog barked somewhere behind her. She tightened her hold on her knees, and her toes clenched inside her half boots. But it was not a stray. Someone gave it a sharp command and it fell silent. She listened attentively for a few moments, but she could hear nothing except the sea and the breeze and the gulls overhead. They had gone, the man and the dog. She relaxed again.

  But just as she did so, something caught at the edge of her vision, and she knew that she had been discovered, that someone else had found this spot, that her peace had been shattered. She felt mortified at being caught sitting on the grass like a girl, hugging her knees. She turned her head sharply.

  The sun was behind him. She had the impression of a tall, broad-shouldered man dressed fashionably in a many-caped greatcoat with a tall beaver hat and black top boots. He had arrived earlier than expected, she thought. He would certainly not approve of finding his future bride thus, alone and unchaperoned. How had he known she was here? She was more than three miles from home. Perhaps his dog had alerted him. Where was the dog?

  Those thoughts flashed through her mind in the mere fraction of a second and were gone. Almost instantly she knew that he was not Sir Edwin Baillie. And in the same instant she knew who he was, even though she could not see his face clearly and had not set eyes on him for longer than eight years.

  She was not sure afterward how long they stayed thus, staring at each other, she sitting on the grass with her arms about her knees, he standing above the hollow, against the skyline. It might have been minutes, but was probably only seconds.

  “Hello, Moira,” he said at last.

  • • •

  KENNETH had come to Cornwall alone, apart from his valet and his coachman and his dog. He had been unable to persuade Eden and Nat to come with him. They had been unable to persuade him to change his mind, even though his decision to come had been made when he was deeply inebriated. But then, he often acted on impulse. There was a restlessness in him that had never quite been put to rest since his sudden decision to leave home and buy himself a commission in the cavalry.

  He was coming home for Christmas. His mother, Ainsleigh and Helen, numerous other family members, and some friends of his mother’s were coming after him. Eden and Nat might come in the spring, they had said, if he was still here in the spring. Perhaps Rex would come, too.

  It had been a mad decision. Winter was not the best time to travel into such a remote part of the country. But the weather was kind to him as he journeyed west, and despite himself, he felt his spirits rise as the landscape became more familiar. For the last two days he rode, with only Nelson for company, leaving his carriage and his servants and baggage to follow him at a slower pace. He wondered by how many days his letter to Mrs. Whiteman, the housekeeper at Dunbarton, had preceded him. Not by many, at a guess. He could imagine the sort of consternation he had caused belowstairs. However, they need not worry. He was used to rough living and no one else would arrive for another two weeks.

  He rode frequently in sight of the sea along a road that never took him any great distance from the edge of high cliffs except when it dipped down into river valleys and up the other side after passing through fishing villages and allowing him glimpses of golden beaches and stone quays and bobbing fishing boats.

  How could he ever have thought that he would never come back?

  The next dip in the road, he knew at last, would give him a view down into the village of Tawmouth. Not that he would go down there on this particular occasion. Dunbarton was on this side of the valley, no more than three or four miles inland. There was sudden elation at the thought. And memories crowded in on him—memories of his boyhood, of people he had known, places he had frequented. One of the latter must be close by.

  Nostalgia caught at his stomach and knotted it. He unconsciously slowed his horse’s pace. It had been one of his favorite places, that hollow. It had been a quiet, secluded place, where one could sit unobserved on the grass, alone with the elements and with one’s dreams. Alone with her. Yes, they had met there sometimes. But he would no longer allow memories of her to color all his memories of home. He had had a happy boyhood.

  He would have ridden on by if Nelson had not barked, his head toward the hollow. Was someone there? Quite unreasonably, Kenneth felt offended at the thought.

  “Sit, Nelson,” he commanded before his dog could dash away to investigate.

  Nelson sat and ga
zed upward with intelligent eyes, waiting for further orders. Without realizing it, Kenneth saw, he had drawn to a complete stop. His horse lowered its head to crop at the grass. How familiar it all looked. As if the eight years and longer had never been.

  He dismounted, left his horse to graze unfettered and Nelson to wait for the command to be revoked, and walked silently toward the lip of the hollow. He hoped there was no one there. He did not feel like being sociable—yet.

  His first instinct was to duck hastily out of sight. There was someone there—a stranger dressed neatly but rather drably in gray cloak and bonnet. She was sitting with knees drawn up, her arms clasped about them. But he did not move, and his gaze sharpened on her. Although she was clearly a woman and he could not see her face around the brim of her bonnet, it was perhaps the girlish posture that alerted him. Suddenly he could hear his heart beating in his ears. She turned her head sharply toward him and the sun shone full on her face.

  Her plain clothing and the passage of years made her look noticeably older, as did the way her very dark hair was dressed beneath the bonnet. It was parted in the center and combed smoothly down over her ears. But she still had her long, oval face, like that of a Renaissance madonna, and her large, dark eyes. She was not pretty—she never had been. But hers was the sort of face that one might see in a crowd and look back at for a lengthier gaze.

  If for a moment he imagined he was seeing a mirage, it was for a mere moment. If his imagination had conjured up her image here in this place, it would have been the image of a barefoot girl with flimsy, light-colored dress and hair released from its pins and falling wild and tangled down her back. It would not have been this image of neat, almost drab respectability. No, she was real. And eight years older.