“Enough.” Ian’s voice was as stealthy and sharp as a saber. “You are beyond insulting. You are disgusting. See yourself out.” The habit of respect alone kept him from bodily tossing the old man out.
His father ignored Ian’s order, and retreated into silence for as long as it was possible for him—a half a minute, no more. “Tell me about her. Where did you find her?”
As if she were breeding stock at a fair.
Ian felt the smoldering, slow-burning fuse of his temper ignite. “I will not discuss my wife with you.”
His father was too stubborn to realize his danger. “Damn you. Who is she? Who are her people? Surely you don’t expect me to change my will for some fortune-hunting bit of muslin without knowing—”
“Shut. Your. Mouth,” Ian roared. “She is the daughter of a former colleague—a King’s man—and is the future mother of your heir, as you would have it. And if you want a lick of influence over any future child, you’ll learn to mind your manners with the mother, and keep a goddamned civil tongue in your head.”
“So there is a child?”
Ian forced himself to cool the hot end of his temper by taking savage delight in his lies. He would not dignify his father’s insolence with a reply. “The fact remains that I shall not be going to Ciren Castle, nor shall my wife. This is her house, her home—deeded to her in the settlements—and we shall both stay here. The answer to any and all of your questions is no.”
“What do you mean, ‘no’?” the Viscount Rainesford barked, and pounded the flat of his palm against the table, turning the full brunt of his wrathful insistence upon his recalcitrant son.
“No,” Ian repeated simply. “Again, no. So now you may go.” He crossed to the bellpull and tugged, hoping to God that the damn thing actually worked, and Pinky, not one of the Totts, was going to toddle in.
“Be damned to you. I’m not leaving until I—”
Pinky, bless his bright pink cheeks, appeared in no time, throwing open the door sharpish, though he looked out of breath with exertion. His face was practically glowing.
“Pinky, his lordship is leaving. Please be so good as to see him out,” Ian instructed.
His father remained seated, red-faced with ire. “Are you mad, or just insolent?” he bawled. “I’m not going anywhere in this weather. The horses are winded from the run down. Think of the cattle and the coachmen, out in this weather, if you can think of no one and nothing else.”
Ian had known that it had grown colder since the afternoon—he could feel the weather in his bones—but his father’s scathing setdown forced him to take a keener look out the windows. The barest beginnings of snow flurries were whirling through the damp, frigid air, and the December night was turning nasty.
In the corridor Pinky was now engaged in consultation with the coachman and two postilions, who were shaking their heads and frowning deeply in a manner not suited to put Ian’s mind at ease.
“Don’t like to risk my animals, sir.” The coachman appealed directly to Ian. “They’ve not even rested from the journey here. I can’t see them even making it so far as Ryde without any rest, and I don’t like the looks of this weather. Best stay put until the storm breaks.”
“No,” Ian insisted. “Send someone on to Ryde, to see if there’s a fresh team to be had there. Or—”
“Begging your pardon, sir, but we come through Ryde on our way here, and the ostler there was closing up. Only taking horses in, he said, as long as the inn could hold ’em, in this weather.”
Devil take him all the way to bloody hell.
Devil take him quickly. Gull Cottage was a large cottage, as cottages went, with six principal bedrooms, but it wasn’t so big that both his father and the Lesleys could pass each other unseen, and especially not unheard.
Ian looked at Pinky, who ruefully agreed. “Afraid he’s right, sir. Fearful blow it is out. Coming on hard to storm. Shouldn’t like to send any of these landspeople”—Pinky sniffed his compassionate opinion of the inferior species—“out in weather like that.”
“So be it. Show the viscount to a room for the night—he will leave on the morrow. Put him at as much a distance as possible from our other guests,” Ian said in a quiet aside to his man. “At all costs, keep them well away from one another.”
Ian left his father to Pinky’s capable ministrations, and retreated to his desk to write a long, imploring letter to his mother to please, for the love of God, keep him apprised of Ross’s condition. It was torture knowing that he could do nothing for his brother but stall their father, and keep the old bastard from acting before it was time, and pray that his brother would recover enough to resume his duties at some level. Ross was too young to suffer such a heartless fate.
Ian was still crouched around his scrawl of a letter, his fingers smeared with ink, when Pinky returned.
“Settled the viscount at the end of your wing,” he advised. “Opposite end of the house from the colonel and his missus.”
“Good man. Thank you, Pinky.” Ian signed off the letter and sanded it, and pushed back from the table. “God knows what I’m supposed to do next.”
“A bit of air, cap’n. Clear the head, it will. The glasshouse will do the trick, in this weather. It’s coming on to snow, you mark my words. You seal that up—wouldn’t want your father to be finding it, I’m sure—and go across, and I’ll have a cup of something hot and bracing along to you in a minute.”
“Something alcoholic, I hope you mean.”
“Aye, it’s thirsty work, sir. Thirsty work. You get along now.”
Ian did. He sealed the letter and, taking the advice to clear his head after such a day, headed toward the glasshouse through the bitterly cold passageway. The wind nearly pushed him across the slick slate floor, and he was about to curse Pinky for a fool and turn back, when the old tar bustled along humming a familiar Christmassy air—and come to think of it, Pinky’d been doing a powerful lot of bustling and humming that day—with two steaming mugs in his hand. Two.
“Pinky? What are you up to?”
“Sailing while the breeze is up, sir. Breezing up.” His words frosted in the air above his head as he shoved the mugs into Ian’s witless hands. “A Christmas nog, cap’n. For you to share.” He put his back to the glasshouse door. “In you go, sir. While the breeze is up.”
“It’s more than a breeze, Pinky,” Ian said, laughing into the teeth of the wind, which was picking up to a gale, because Pinky’s sailorly expression had nothing to do with the weather, and everything to do with the girl he hoped was within the glasshouse. But it was damn cold. “We’re likely to have more than just snow this night.”
Devil take them if the weather stranded his father. God only knew what he would do if he were trapped in a house with the viscount. Patricide seemed the likeliest result.
“Then best get on with it, and then be off to bed. But take a moment for a bit of the yuletide cheer.” Pinky nodded at the steaming mugs. “Nothing like a bit of yuletide cheer.”
“Thank you, Pinky.” Ian slipped into the glasshouse, and waited for the peaceful hush of the shelter to clear his ears after the harsh whistle of the wind. But what he heard instead was a song. A carol.
A beautifully fine, clear voice was softly singing an old country carol.
“‘Arise and go,’ the angels said,
‘To Bethlehem, be not afraid.
And there you’ll find this blessed morn
A princely babe, sweet Jesus born.’”
She was musical. She played the pianoforte and she also sang like a reverent angel, her voice a glorious combination of clear and bright and intimate that made him feel as if she were singing for him alone. But of course she wasn’t—she was singing for herself alone.
Her song faded into silence the moment his boot sounded on the slate floor.
“Anne? Is that you?”
It was of course she, standing at the end of a row, her cloak turned silver in the moonlight.
“I heard you singing.
”
She did not answer, but disappeared a bit, back into the voluminous folds of the cloak. Only the long, elegant slide of her nose peeked out of the hood.
“It was very pretty,” he assured her. “But you must be cold. Here—I’ve brought some Christmas cheer. Although you sounded rather wonderfully Christmassy.” He handed her the mug, and stopped himself from telling her Pinky had sent it. He didn’t want to give all the credit to Pinky. The old tar had told him to make sail while the breeze was up, hadn’t he?
“Thank you.” She took the hot drink gratefully, wrapping her hands around the mug to warm her fingers. “Mmmm. That’s divine. That’s”—she blew out a rum-flavored breath—“potent. Goodness, what is that? I feel like I have turned into a fire-breathing dragon.”
He smiled at the image. “Rum, my girl. Dark, Barbados rum. A stiff drink for a stiff breeze. Christmas cheer as Pinky would have it.”
“Did that old cherub make this? Goodness,” she said again on a laugh. “Christmas cheer, indeed. Who knew he had it in him?”
Ian knew exactly what the old lad had in him, and at the moment he was more than glad. Pinky’s penchant for finding the best in people had proved to be more than a boon to Ian this long day and evening. And speaking of evening.… “It must be getting on for midnight.”
Anne turned her face to look at the sky, steely white with heavy clouds. “Makes me think of ‘Oh Holy Night.’”
“Sing it for me.”
She shook her head—a swift negative. “No. I couldn’t.”
“You were singing before. As I said, it sounded very pretty.”
She could not be convinced. “It’s the acoustics. The glass makes the sound sharper, clearer.”
He tried a smile upon her. “Then it must have been you who made it sound so sweet.”
Again she did not answer, so Ian bided his time, and let the rum do its work for him, softening her up.
He came to stand beside her, as if he, too, were contemplating the sky overhead. She seemed more comfortable when he wasn’t looking directly at her, though he himself wanted nothing more than to look at her again, and figure how she had gone from someone plain to someone rather astonishing in his eyes within the space of one day.
But standing so still, the cold began to seep through his boots—the price of his vanity in wearing the stylish Hessians. “Devil take us, but it’s cold. Raw and damp with a rising wind out of the northeast. I can smell it coming on to snow.”
“I should think the snow were the least of your worries.” Her voice was as quiet as always, but had something more of that pert intelligence he liked so much. “That was quite a lie you told your father.”
Ian winched up his face in a show of ruefulness. “You’re not going to let me sail on by this particular shoal, are you?”
“No.” The hood of her cloak tipped up to look at him. “You seem to have put yourself—put us all—in a considerable quandary.”
He laughed, the sound turning cold and bleak as it bounded off the glass walls. “That would be an understatement.”
“Would you care to explain?”
“No. I wouldn’t care to, but I know I must. I may be a ramshackle fellow, Anne, but I do know right from wrong, however, and I did lie to my father.” His breath was frosting in front of his face as he looked up. She must be frozen. “Do you care to sit? There ought to be a bench here somewhere, where you can rest.” And he could snug her up beside him, wrapped up tight.
He led her to the end of the row, past covered plant boxes full of tender seedlings. No lush, tropical setting for seduction, this. It was a working glasshouse, where every spare inch of table space was covered with wooden flats of seedlings—evidence of Pinky’s penchant for the husbandry of herbs.
Ian wanted to take Anne to his bedchamber, and cuddle her against him and warm her there, and forget everything else and damn the consequences. But he was an officer and a gentleman. And there were her parents, not to mention Pinky—who had clearly appointed himself as her guardian angel—standing ready to make sure he did not.
There it was, a bench, plain and unadorned, sitting in an unused corner. “Let me warm your feet.” He turned and sat, holding out his hands.
She stood before him for a long moment, and with a whisper of a glance down at her feet, said, “You are avoiding making an answer.”
“So I am,” he agreed reasonably. “But I can warm your feet while I answer.”
There was another long, still pause before she agreed. “All right. They are cold.” She was nothing if not practical, this terrifyingly straightforward, logical girl.
“If I’m to keep my ancestors from rolling over in their graves at my ungentlemanly manner, and warm your feet, it would help if you would sit.”
She collected her skirts, and carefully sat at the far end of the bench. The pale oval of her face peeking from her hood was all that was visible of her in the darkness.
“I should light a lamp.”
“No, if you please. Pinky left a lantern, but I prefer the darkness. And I’d prefer that you explain your lie.”
Ian took up one of her feet, and set himself to unlacing her boot. “I lied to him before. Seven days ago. I told him then that I was already married.”
Ian could almost feel the wave of astonishment evolve off her, before she ever spoke. “Why?”
Ian busied himself pulling her half boot off, and plying his thumbs into the arch of her foot, to chafe some warmth back into her chilly extremities. He needed some action to occupy him while he sorted out what to say. Finally he said, “Because I wanted to choose for myself. I wanted to choose a young woman who was her own person, and wouldn’t be swayed, or fall prey to my father’s machinations about the title and the succession.”
“Oh.” She drew her foot away, and pushed it back into her boot. “I see,” she said in a whisper so bare he had to lean toward her to hear it. “But—I don’t see. Why should the title and succession matter at all to you?”
Ian turned his face back to the barren, frozen sky. “Because my brother is dying.”
Chapter Ten
“Oh, Ian!”
Even as the seeping heat of worry savaged his chest, Ian had to smile at her use of his Christian name. Finally. “See? That wasn’t so hard.”
She was not to be so easily distracted. “I’m so sorry. What happened?”
He might as well tell her all—there was no one else to whom he could speak, or even try to articulate the seething roil of anger and fear within. “He took a fall. From a bloody hunter that my father had scorned him for not being able to ride. A bloody, fractious, monster of a beast that should have been put to bed with a bullet years ago. There was no reason my father should have kept him on, except to taunt Ross. Poor Ross, whom my father knew would do anything to please him. Everything he had ever asked.” Ian flung himself off the bench, and began to pace back and forth in the welcome dark, glad that the night would not truly reveal him in this agitated state.
Anne’s question was full of pity. “What has been done for him?”
“Everything possible, I am assured by my mother, who has gone to care for him. But on the advice of some of the doctors, my father despaired of his ever being whole—of ever walking again. He is especially fraught at the judgment that Ross will no longer be able to sire children.”
Though she said nothing, Ian could hear Anne’s sharp breath of distress.
“Yes.” He could only agree. “Hence his sudden interest in me. And my entry into the state of holy matrimony. And thus you. And the potential fruit, as it were”—he gestured hopelessly to the swathed fertile greenery about them—“of your loins. No. I’ve got it all wrong.” He let out a mirthless laugh. “Your womb. My loins.”
She exhaled the breath she had just taken in. “Oh heavens. I think I’m going to need more rum if I’m to contemplate my womb being fruitful.” She took a deep draught from Pinky’s mug.
“I don’t know.” Ian was happy to feel his face
stretch into a smile. “If you have come to making jokes, I should think you’ve already had too much rum.”
“I don’t think too much rum is possible, given this news.” She patted her chest to dispel the effects of the strong spirits. “But I am sorry. You were talking seriously, when I interrupted.”
“Not an unwelcome interruption.” Not at all unwelcome. Very welcome in fact. She was welcome. Very welcome.
“Is it a sure thing, that he will not recover?”
“I don’t know.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I don’t think anyone knows for sure. I can only hope. And pray. And worry.”
“Yes. Of course.” She shook her head, even though she was agreeing with him.
“God, Anne. I used to envy him, you know? I used to be jealous of all the things I thought Ross had that I had not. The inheritance … the privilege of someday being the viscount. The attention that I thought he received from our parents. The trappings of the heirdom—the hunters and the dogs and the assemblies and the girls. The holidays at home—Christmas full of fire-breathing nogs and family and fun. Damn my eyes, Anne. I was twelve when my father took me from all that. Twelve years old, and forced to give it all up to go to sea.”
This time, her distress could not be hidden. “Oh, Ian. I can’t imagine.”
He tried to dispel both her pity, and his own, with a laugh—gallows humor. “Neither could I. I could not believe it. I thought it was all a bloody awful mistake. A cruel hoax. I thought for sure they would take me back, and let me come home. I was wrong.”
“Twelve years old. That’s monstrous.”
“That is life, and life in the navy. I wasn’t the only one, by any means. Just the only one who didn’t want to go. But I was wrong, about Ross. And I learned. I learned better. And I have long since outgrown such foolishness. I have long since realized that he has had the far harder road—the expectations and the ludicrous pressure to perform, and to perform perfectly. He has had day after day of our father baiting and berating him, always telling him that he is not good enough. Always. Devil take me. All I had to do was not get myself killed.”
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