“You two run along. I’ve a few things to see to.”
“They can wait, right, Lucy?”
His unwitting conspirator let go of his hand, crossed to the countess, and dragged her by the wrist over to Christian. He seized the lady’s hand in his own.
“My princess has spoken, as it were. Go gracefully to your fate.”
Gillian’s blue eyes reflected exasperation, but also something he hadn’t expected to see: hurt. She tried to mask it, but it caused his smile to falter.
“Please, Countess. I’ve been shut up with the ledgers all morning, and I would have this respite with the fair ladies of my household.”
She slipped her fingers through his. “Very well, but we mustn’t linger too long. Lucy has sums to do, and I have correspondence of my own.”
“Who commands your letters?” he asked as Lucy took his free hand and fell in step beside him.
“Marcus Easterbrook,” she said, her tone gratifyingly impatient. “I can report to him that my things are removed from Greendale.” Her usually confident stride hitched. “He is Greendale, now. How…odd.”
“It is odd,” Christian said, resisting the urge to carry Lucy, because that would mean dropping the countess’s hand. “You finally get comfortable with your courtesy title, assure yourself the real title holder will live forever, and then—poof!—he’s gone, and you’re the duke, or the earl, and everybody calls you something you don’t answer to, and looks to you for decisions you’ve no idea how to make.”
“I don’t think Easterbrook—Marcus—will be quite so at sea,” the countess said. “He’s waited an age to succeed to the title, though he and the old earl were hardly close.”
“They were uncle and nephew?” Though Christian didn’t care for the topic particularly, he was glad they were having some sort of conversation—while they held hands.
“Great-nephew, the title being one preserved through the female line. Their visits were mostly a matter of Marcus putting up with his lordship’s condescension. Marcus came to Greendale when on leave, but was always relieved to be on his way to Severn when proprieties had been observed.”
“He came by in my absence?”
“He was dutiful, and your heir.”
“Not once Evan was born.” Lucy tugged on Christian’s hand, dragging him over to a bed of roses, and forcing him to give up his connection to the countess. “You know, princess, when you don’t speak to me, it means you communicate more often with your touch. You pull me about, turn my head, touch my arm… I’m not sure I miss your words as much as I’d miss this.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the countess was listening to him. Good. She thought he would not compromise her, but it was more a matter of he could not, despite wanting to.
But neither would he let her slip into indifference when they could be friends—good friends.
“Maybe you should not encourage Lucy to remain silent,” she said as he knelt to sniff a rose. “Maybe we should all stop speaking until she relents.”
He rose, pleased to feel the motion fluid and no particular strain on his thighs or knees. “Then perhaps I should have to touch you more, Countess, and you would have to touch me, hmm?”
He took her hand again, she didn’t fight him, and they managed to reach the stables without trading any more salvos. Even sparring with her was a pleasure though, and Christian kept his powder dry mostly out of deference to his daughter.
“Princess, I was out with Hancock yesterday,” he said as they ambled down the barn aisle. “I came across a little fellow who demanded to make your acquaintance. He doesn’t speak much, not so a duke could understand him, but he managed to insist that you befriend him.”
Lucy cocked her head, her expression solemn and puzzled. The countess was pretending to pet Chessie, but she was listening too. He knew it by the angle of her head, and the slight tension in her shoulders.
“Where is he, this stray fellow demanding to be your friend? Come, I’ll show you.”
He drew Lucy farther down the aisle, while the countess trailed them. When he opened the half door to an empty stall, Lucy peered around her papa’s side into the gloom.
“He’s resting,” Christian said. “No doubt exhausted from chewing old boots, cadging treats, and tripping up the lads.”
Lucy dashed around him to kneel before two puppies dozing on an old horse blanket. The puppies blinked at her sleepily, yawned, and let her pet them. She held a hand up to her father, two fingers raised.
“Yes, there are two.” Mostly because carrying eight puppies home on horseback would not have been practical.
The countess came up beside him. “Oh, my. Christian, what have you done?” She brushed past him to kneel in the straw next to Lucy. “Lucy, just look at them. Look at those paws, and their ears, such silky precious ears, and those handsome eyes…”
Lucy cocked her head, asking the question the countess would not.
“This one…” Christian stroked a hand over the runt, who appeared to have grown in less than twenty-four hours, “is for my dearest Lucy.” He handed his daughter her puppy, as its sibling struggled to his paws. “And this one is for my dearest Gillian. He has no sense, I’m told, but he’s much in need of a friend, lest he stumble into a rain barrel and come to harm. You’re good at befriending strays, my dear. I had to commend him into your keeping.”
“I’m good at…” She cradled the dog to her cheek. “You wretched, awful, odious, low-down… Oh, Christian.” Then the dog was licking Christian’s ear, for the countess had leaned in to hug him as tightly as she could with a wiggling puppy between them. Christian wrapped an arm around the lady, gave her a squeeze, then forced himself to lean away.
“I gather you like your pets, ladies?”
Lucy nodded emphatically, the dog cradled in her embrace.
“What shall you name him, Lucy?”
She pointed without hesitation, and Christian followed the line of her finger.
“Rake?”
She nodded.
“Interesting choice for the fellow who wasn’t the most outgoing of the lot,” Christian said. “You may call him Rake, while I shall call him Runt. This one was Dimwit, but the countess may choose another nom de maison for him.”
The French came out easily, naturally, the way any English aristocrat normally peppered his speech with French—and without even a frisson of nausea.
Interesting. He had the disconcerting thought that Girard would have been proud of him.
Christian assisted Gillian to her feet, keeping an arm around her waist. “Let’s introduce them to the gardens, shall we?”
Lucy put her puppy on the ground, while the countess kept hers in her arms until they reached the garden. Christian strolled along, treasuring the feel of Gillian at his side, silently promising the dog years at the hearth if he continued to provoke such a sentimental mood from the countess.
In captivity, Christian had never been touched in friendship, never known tenderness or kindness at the hands of another. If he was forced to accept a bath, the service was rendered with disrespect. If he was tended by a doctor, it was without anesthetic or palliative, the care given hurriedly, even fearfully.
And Girard’s hands on him had been businesslike and fleeting—thank a merciful Deity.
Lady Greendale had renewed a certain appetite in him, one he hadn’t realized he’d possessed—for sweet touches, for care and tenderness and tactile loving kindness. She had it in her very nature to offer such touches, and she’d have him believe she even desired him.
He could not atone for that, but neither would he part with her physical presence in his life. If he had to buy her dogs, give her horses, and keep his own animal nature to himself to do it, he would.
By God, he would.
***
The puppies were effective diplomatic overtures. Gi
lly understood them clearly for the olive branch they were intended to be. She wasn’t sure what Christian’s motives were with respect to Lucy, but the child adored her pet.
Not Christian. Mercia.
“We’re to have a guest.”
“You startled me, Your Grace.” Gilly put down her embroidery hoop as he took the seat beside her on a bench amid his mother’s rose gardens. Yards away, Lucy tossed a ball to the pups, who grew larger by the day, like creatures from some fairy tale.
“I don’t know who plays harder,” Mercia said, “the child or the dogs, but it’s too quiet, that scene. She should be shrieking with laughter, calling directions to them. Every night, I go to bed telling myself we’re one day closer to when she speaks to us again, but it grows difficult to keep that faith.”
Oh, and wouldn’t he offer just such a confidence, a glimpse of paternal insecurity more dear to Gilly than all his ducal swaggering about the estate with Hancock.
“I have the sense,” he went on, “this silence of hers has a purpose.”
“What sort of purpose?”
“I don’t know. What are you embroidering now?”
She held up a silk shawl, sized for a child, the hems decorated with dragons tumbling along one side, unicorns leaping across another. She’d made sure the creatures were a bit chubby and that every one of them grinned its way across the fabric.
“For Lucy?”
“I can make one for you, Your Grace.”
“And wouldn’t that be lovely? His Grace dressing in lady’s clothing. See how long I’d stay out of Bedlam when that got out.”
“You are the last person who will find himself in Bedlam.” She hoped her tone put this observation in the realm of fact rather than opinion. “Who is your guest?”
“Our guest.”
She let that go by, a harmless dart in their ongoing struggle to…what? In her case, it was a struggle to not fall in love with a man who was determined to be decent to her when what she sought was indulgence of her wanton nature.
Her recently discovered, very frustrated wanton nature, damn him. Greendale was probably laughing at her from the grave.
As she fell asleep at night, try though she might to pray her way to the arms of Morpheus, Gilly found herself calling to mind the lovely heat of Christian’s naked skin, the taste of his mouth on hers, the silky texture of his hair, and the pleasure—the utter, soul-deep relief, and the pleasure—of being held securely in his arms.
While Christian seemed equally determined to entice her into some sort of friendship.
He wasn’t exactly charming, though he was attentive, seeking her out several times a day, always with some question: Was the lavender ready for harvest? Did she fancy goat cheese or only cow cheese? Had Lucy enough books to keep her occupied?
And now, they were to have a guest.
“Who is this guest?”
“Colonel Devlin St. Just. The Duke of Moreland’s oldest, though born on the wrong side of the blanket. I traveled with him in France.”
How to ask: Before or after the ordeal of captivity?
He was rubbing his thumb over a hem of Gilly’s shawl, the black silk she wore around the property except on the warmest days.
“Are you looking forward to this company?”
“You called me Christian.”
“I did no such thing.”
“When you saw Dimwit,” he said, his fingers slowing as they moved over the fabric. “You said, ‘Oh, Christian.’”
She’d hoped he had not noticed. “I beg your pardon then, it was an oversight.”
“My name is not an oversight. I used yours, too.”
He’d called her his dearest Gillian, and she’d had to hide her eyes against a silky, panting puppy. And now, the dratted man was going somewhere conversationally. Somewhere Gilly did not want him to go.
“If you used my name, sir, you overstepped.”
“You invited me to use it, my dear.” He was smiling now, faintly, his gaze on the shawl, and that didn’t bode well at all. “Because you’ve shaved me and dressed my hair.”
And she’d kissed him. Merciful feathered saints.
“How are you managing?” she asked reluctantly, though she had wondered—incessantly. “You’ve remained clean shaven.”
“I was uneasy regarding the proximity of a razor to my throat.” The smile was gone as if it had never existed, a seedling unable to sprout roots or leaves. “If I don’t think of the blade, if I concentrate on the scraping away of my whiskers, not on having them scraped, I manage. Does that make sense?”
“You stay outside the business,” she said, knowing all too well what he meant. “You watch yourself being shaved, as if you were the man in the mirror, not the one whom the razor touches.”
“Yes.” A telltale crease appeared between his golden brows. He was puzzling something out, possibly about her. She spoke to distract him.
“Tell me about this Colonel St. Just.”
The duke blew out a considering breath. “He is both canny and kind, probably a soldier poet beneath all his Irish charm and ducal bluster. I traveled north with him when I left Toulouse. He’s the oldest of ten, and it informs his style of command.”
“Interesting. Aren’t most officers younger sons?”
“Many are. I think you will like him, and I know he will like you.”
“What are you insinuating?”
“Nothing,” he said, reaching over to pat her hand. “Not one thing.”
And then he fell silent, watching his silent daughter, and Gilly could do nothing but sit silently beside him, wondering what it meant when a man recalled a lady’s every word but refused to kiss her again.
***
“You are charming my countess,” Christian said, passing a brandy to St. Just. In civilian clothes, the colonel was handsomer than ever, and Christian was curiously glad to see him.
“Lady Greendale is charming me,” St. Just said, pausing before a pistol crossbow, the smallest in the Severn family collection. “My thanks for the libation. This little darling has to be quite venerable.”
He held his drink as he studied the weapon, a man who knew to savor the finer things, when another officer on leave might have tossed back his brandy at one go.
“That weapon is two hundred years old, at least.” And it still looked lethal as hell. “Her ladyship charms all in her ambit, including my daughter.” Though what had been amiss with the late earl of Greendale, that Gillian apparently hadn’t charmed him?
Christian poured himself a drink from the tray some thoughtful countess had sent up to the armory, half the amount he’d given St. Just.
St. Just turned his attention to a longbow, a weapon nearly as tall as the men who would have used it.
“If Lady Greendale is the reason your hands don’t shake, you’ve put on two stone of muscle, and your eyes no longer look like you recently took tea in hell’s family parlor, then I must consider her a friend.”
“She’s part of it.” Two stone? Well, perhaps one. One and a half. “A big part. She has the gift of domesticity, of creating a comforting sort of tranquillity.”
“My five sisters do that for me. Her Grace is not my mother, though for reasons known only to her, she loves me as if I were one of her own. The girls, though…they scold and hug and laugh and watch a fellow all the while, catching him at the odd moment and prying confidences from him.”
“And you love them for it?”
He moved on to another longbow, this one Welsh and supposedly a veteran of the Battle of Agincourt. Christian’s father had let him shoot it once, on his fifteenth birthday. His forearm had sported a fierce bruise for weeks.
“How can I not love such sisters?” St. Just asked. “You saw what I saw on the Peninsula. The officers’ wives, the laundresses, the cooks. They put up with the same depr
ivations the soldiers did, and complained a good deal less.”
Both men fell silent, while St. Just was polite enough to appear to savor his drink and Christian wondered why generations of Severns had kept these weapons in this high-ceilinged, carpeted stronghold, as if they were treasures rather than instruments of death.
“I dread going home, too, though,” St. Just said, apropos of nothing save perhaps his drink, the lateness of the hour, and the battered suit of armor standing guard in a corner.
“You do,” Christian said, “because you think the effort of holding the war inside you, and your family outside you, will defeat your reason. When you were campaigning, it was exactly the opposite. You carried your family in your heart, and the fighting went on around you. It’s…difficult, being a soldier, and also somebody’s son, somebody’s dear older brother.”
Somebody’s papa.
The proceeds from a sale of this old lot of death and destruction would feed a deal of puppies.
Or old soldiers.
“And as carefully as they teach us to shoot,” St. Just said, sighting down the stock of a cavalry crossbow, “as punctiliously as we look after our mounts and our gear and our weapons, they don’t teach us what to do with that difficulty of being two men housed in one body. I suspect it’s half the motivation for the battlefield heroics we saw time after time.”
Christian took the cranequin from him and replaced it on its brass wall hooks. “A wish to die rather than hold those two men in one body?”
“A deadly confusion, in any case, a fatal inability to suffer both peace and war in the same human being.”
St. Just had no visible scars, but watching him balance an ivory-handled dagger on his finger, carefully indifferent to the weapon’s nature, while minutely attentive to its craftsmanship, Christian endured an abrupt need to drag his guest from the armory.
“Be glad, St. Just, you don’t have to add to a soldier’s confusion the burden of a ducal succession.”
St. Just put the knife down beside its mates on a bed of blue velvet. “What can be confusing about that? Surely even the French couldn’t spoil your recall of those activities.”
The Captive Page 17