The Runaway Countess

by Amanda McCabe

  Especially when they hadn’t needed to get out the buckets to catch the drips from the old roof, thanks to his efficient workmen.

  ‘One more game, Emma, then off to bed,’ Jane said, twisting the needle through the cloth.

  She expected an argument. Emma was a night-owl who could happily stay up until dawn. But Emma just nodded and gave a strangely sly smile as she studied her new hand of cards.

  ‘Of course,’ Emma said. ‘I have some notes to make on my new plant specimens, anyway. You can take my place at cards, Jane.’

  Jane shook her head. ‘I don’t play cards any longer.’

  Hayden shot her a quizzical glance, but he didn’t say anything until the game ended and Emma bid them goodnight. Once she had left, Murray trotting at her heels, the room seemed deeply quiet. She could only hear the soft slide of the cards between his fingers, the fall of the rain, the rustle of the linen under her needle. But she was intensely, burningly aware that he sat just across the room from her. That he watched her.

  ‘You don’t play cards?’ he said suddenly, the words tossed out into the heavy silence. ‘I remember you were a wicked opponent at whist.’

  Jane shook her head. ‘I even had to give up such old-fashioned games. I hated losing far too much and Emma has become too good a player.’

  ‘Emma is certainly an enthusiastic opponent,’ he said. ‘But are you sure you didn’t stop because of me?’

  Startled by his stark question, Jane dropped her mending to her lap and stared at him. He looked back at her, unwavering, unblinking, his blue eyes dark and solemn. ‘I—Well, yes. I didn’t like what you became when you played deep in the card rooms. So intense, so—feverish. It was as if I didn’t know you there. But then again…’

  Her words stuck and she shook her head again. She was so accustomed to stuffing her true thoughts and emotions down deeper and deeper, so deep that Hayden couldn’t see them and thus hurt her even more. She didn’t know what to do with this new Hayden, this still, watchful, serious Hayden.

  ‘Then again—what, Jane?’ he asked.

  ‘Then again, I often felt like I didn’t know you at all,’ she admitted. ‘When I saw you at balls, in the card rooms, with your friends, I was sure I had only imagined the man I thought I married. He vanished so utterly and you never seemed to know me at all.’

  He nodded and stared down at the pack of cards in his hand. A straight, frowning line creased between his eyes.

  ‘I should have come here when you asked me to,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Jane said in surprise.

  ‘That last night, before you left London, you asked me to come here with you and Emma for a holiday. I should have done it.’

  Jane couldn’t believe he even remembered that. He’d been so foxed that night on the stairs, she’d been so sure he remembered nothing about it. And when she left the town house the next day without a word from him, she was sure she was right. That he didn’t care at all.

  ‘Barton is a special place, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I’ve never felt like a house could be this way.’

  Jane knew that very well. Barton was her home. But she would never have thought he could see it. ‘What way?’

  ‘Like a real home,’ he said simply.

  Jane’s heart pounded at those stark words. That was what she had tried to tell him so long ago; why she tried to get him to come here with her. Why did he see now, when it was too late?

  She tried to laugh, but the sound came out all choked. ‘Perhaps it will be, now that you have fixed the roof.’

  ‘That was the least I could do. I owe you so much, Jane, and yet you won’t accept anything from me.’

  ‘You don’t owe me anything, Hayden,’ she said. She didn’t want debt between them, not any longer. She’d only wanted to leave him, leave the mistake of them, behind so she could find some way to move forwards. But all that effort was shattered when he showed up here.

  ‘Your family must have been so happy here,’ he said. ‘You never talked about them, except for Emma.’

  ‘You never spoke of your family, either.’

  His lips twisted in a strange, bitter little smile. ‘My family isn’t really worth talking about. My parents were most typical of the aristocratic sort. Nothing worth analysing.’

  Jane had to laugh. ‘My parents weren’t typical at all.’

  ‘Then what were they like?’

  She closed her eyes and pictured them as they had once sat in this very room. Her father huddled over his books, her mother’s lips pinched tightly together as she watched him. Baby Emma playing with her blocks by the fire. Barton Park fading and crumbling around them even back then. But there was also that sense of security and belonging, that sense she wanted to bring to her own family.

  ‘They were—eccentric,’ she said.

  ‘That sounds intriguing. Eccentric in what way?’

  ‘Well, did I ever tell you the tale of the Barton treasure?’

  Hayden laughed and, despite everything, she still revelled in that sound. ‘Treasure? Not at all. I can’t believe you kept such a thing from me. It sounds positively piratical.’

  ‘And if anyone likes all things piratical, it’s surely you,’ Jane said with a laugh. She told him what she knew of the Barton Park treasure and how it was lost in the mists of time.

  ‘But even though that was a mere legend,’ she ended, ‘it captured my father’s imagination when he was a boy. And by the time Emma and I were older, it completely took over his life. He spent days and days poring over old family papers looking for clues and maps. My mother hated his obsession, hated how it took over everything else. My father just said she would be glad once he found the treasure and we were all rich.’

  She glanced up to find Hayden watching her closely, his chin propped on his palm.

  ‘I take it he never found it,’ Hayden said.

  ‘Obviously not.’ Jane waved around at the shabby room, the faded wallpaper peeling at the edges and the mended curtains. ‘He died before he could even find a real clue, while I was still a girl. My mother followed soon after, probably in a fit of rage that he had escaped her without leaving the promised treasure. That was how I came to be in London, with an aunt I hardly knew and who wasn’t best happy to be suddenly saddled with two nieces.’

  ‘And then you met me.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jane said, remembering the bright, perfect dream of that time she had found Hayden. ‘And that is the strange, sad tale of my family at Barton Park.’

  ‘Sad?’ he said. ‘It’s an odd one, no doubt. Eccentric, as you said. But was it sad? Were you unhappy here?’

  ‘Not at all.’ Jane was surprised at the truth of those words, at realising why it was she had longed to come back to Barton. ‘Anyone with a conventional life would have thought we must be most unhappy, but Emma and I never felt so. We had a freedom most girls never know and we were always sure we belonged here. That we belonged to each other.’

  ‘I was always quite sure I did not belong at Ramsay House,’ Hayden said. Despite the simple sadness of those words, his tone was calm and matter of fact, as if everyone’s life was like that.

  She knew so little about Hayden’s family. His parents were long dead when she met him and he never spoke about them. At Ramsay House she’d seen their portraits, but all she could glean from them was that his mother had been a beauty with her son’s blue eyes and his father was very stern and unsmiling.

  When she asked Hayden about his childhood, all he would say was, ‘It was most typical.’

  She knew typical for a young man of his station meant tutors and school. Not the slightly chaotic and shabby life she and Emma knew here at Barton. But what was it like when he was with his parents?

  ‘What was life like at Ramsay House?’ she asked.

  Hayden shrugged. ‘Quiet most of the time. My mother was seldom there; she preferred town life.’

  Like her son? Maybe that was why he was the way he was. ‘And your father?’

  ‘A cou
ntryman through and through. He was most happy with his horses and dogs, or when he was walking the fields or visiting tenants. Ramsay House was everything to him. Duty and the family name, all that. I was a disappointment to him all round.’

  ‘How could you possibly be a disappointment to them?’ Jane cried. ‘A handsome, popular young heir. What more could they want?’

  ‘My brother, I suppose.’

  ‘Your brother?’ She was shocked. She’d never heard of any sibling before.

  ‘Did you not know I had an older brother? He died as a child, before I was born, But my father was quite convinced he would have been the perfect heir. Serious and dutiful, dedicated to all things Ramsay. Not an irresponsible gadabout like the son they were stuck with. I finally ceased to go to Ramsay House on my school holidays, just so I wouldn’t hear the same conversation all over again. John Eastwood’s parents kindly took me in instead. Then I only had to hear about my shortcomings in letters. It all worked out very well.’

  He sounded joking, as if he were merely recalling amusing peccadilloes from the past, but Jane knew him too well to be fooled. She had come to sense that there was something he hid deep inside, some hurt he covered up in drink and parties, something he would never reveal to her. Until now.

  Jane’s heart ached as she turned his words over in her mind. It ached for the boy he had once been, who surely only wanted to be accepted in the role he had to play. But when nothing would satisfy his father, when nothing could compare to a boy who was dead…

  What else could he do but close off his heart? Live up to their low expectations until they became the truth. Until neither he nor anyone else could tell where the ruse ended and the real Hayden began.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Hayden,’ she said. ‘They were wrong to believe those things. If only they could have seen the earl you’ve become.’

  Hayden gave a bitter-sounding laugh. ‘They would be just as disappointed as ever. My father would be happy to proclaim he was right, though I certainly get my taste for brandy from him. And my mother died in childbirth, trying to give my father another son long after she should have ceased bearing children. Poor Mother. But did I not disappoint you, too, Jane? In the end.’

  She shook her head, her eyes aching with tears. Just in those few words she had learned so much, saw so much. Her sweet Hayden. How she missed him, missed the man she’d fallen in love with and first been married to. How deeply she wished he would come back.

  Yes, she had been disappointed once. She had been confused and angry. But now she perhaps had the first inkling of why. She didn’t know how to tell him that. She had to show him.

  Jane feared she would start crying at his words. Hayden tried to make them sound light, inconsequential. But she’d never heard him say much about his family before; she’d only known they had died before she met him. And now she could hear the old, but still raw, pain in his voice. The pain that told him he could never build a real family. She slowly rose to her feet, went to kneel beside him and took his hand in hers.

  His eyes widened in surprise. Before he could say anything, before she could remember everything that lay like a gulf of hurt between them and change her mind, she rose up to kiss him. She pressed one swift, soft kiss to his lips, then another and another, teasing him until he half-laughed, half-groaned and pulled her even closer against him. So close nothing could come between them at all.

  He moaned against her lips and deepened the kiss, his tongue lightly seeking hers, and Jane was lost in him all over again. The way it once was, the hot need that always rose in her when he touched her, surrounded them all over again like a wall of flame that shut out the rest of the world. She only wanted to be this close to him again, always. To be part of him and make him part of her.

  She had questioned, worried, wondered for so long. Now she only wanted to be with Hayden again, to feel as only he could make her feel.

  Hayden’s lips slid away from hers and he pressed tiny, fleeting kisses to her cheek, the line of her jaw, that oh-so-sensitive spot just below her ear. The spot that had always made her feel so crazy when he kissed it. She shivered at the warm rush of his breath over her skin.

  She laughed breathlessly and wrapped her arms around his shoulders to try to hold herself straight. She feared she would fall down and down into love with him again and be lost for good this time.

  ‘Jane, Jane,’ he whispered hoarsely, pressing his lips to her hair, ‘we can’t go on like this. I still need you so much.’

  She rested her cheek on the curve of his neck and inhaled deeply the wonderful, familiar scent of his skin. This had always been the one true thing between them, the way their bodies knew one another, craved one another. Said things they never could in words.

  And she knew in that moment she had to let go of her fears. Silently, she took his hand in hers again and led him to the old sofa in the corner. She only wanted to feel the way only Hayden could make her feel. She wanted to feel close to him again.

  She laid back on the cushions and looked up at him in the shadows. His eyes glowed and his face looked taut and intent with the desire she could tell he tried to hold back. She raised her arms up to him in a silent gesture of welcome.

  ‘Jane—are you sure?’ he said roughly.

  ‘Shh, Hayden,’ she whispered. She wanted no words now. Words only shattered the spell she wanted to weave around them. To try to repair some of the damage they’d so carelessly done.

  She reached up and drew the pins from her hair, letting it coil around her shoulders. He’d always liked her hair and she watched his eyes darken as he studied her every movement. Feeling bolder, she shook her hair down her back and slowly unlaced the neckline of her gown. The cool air brushed over her bared shoulders.

  ‘Jane!’ he moaned, rubbing his hand over his eyes. ‘What are you thinking now?’

  ‘Please, Hayden,’ she said. She swallowed her fear and smiled up at him. ‘I want you. Don’t you want me?’

  ‘Of course I do. I’ve always wanted you more than anything in the world. But I—’

  Whatever he wanted to say was lost when he caught her up in his arms and kissed her, passionately, deeply, nothing held back any longer.

  Jane felt as if her soul caught fire. She had to be closer, closer. She pushed his coat away from his shoulders and untied his cravat. For an instant, he was tangled in his clothes and they fell together back on to the sofa, laughing. But once his coat and shirt were tossed on the floor and she felt his bare skin under her hands, the laughter faded.

  Her touch, light, trembling, learned his body all over again. The smooth, damp heat of his skin, the light, coarse hair dusted over his chest, the tight muscles of his stomach, his lean hips.

  The hard ridge of his erection, straining against the cloth of his breeches. Oh, yes—she remembered that very well.

  As they kissed, falling down into the humid heat of need, she felt his hands sliding over her shoulders, releasing the fastenings of her gown and drawing it away.

  She kicked the skirt down and laughed as they slid together, skin to skin, the silken length of her hair twirling around them to bind them together. He pressed his open, hot breath to her neck and all thought vanished into pure sensation.

  Jane closed her eyes and let herself just feel. Feel his hand on her hip, his mouth on the curve of her breast. She ran her hands over his strong shoulders, the arc of his back, and couldn’t believe they were here together like this again. Her legs parted as she felt the weight of his body lower against her.

  He reached between them to unfasten his breeches, then at last he pressed against her and thrust inside. It had been so long since they were together that at first it stung a bit, but that was nothing to the wonderful sensation of being joined with him again.

  She arched up into him, wrapping her arms and legs around him to hold him with her.

  ‘Jane,’ he groaned, and slowly he moved inside her again. Deeper, harder, until there was only pleasure. A wondrous delight that grew and gre
w like a sparkling cloud, spreading all through her.

  Jane cried out, overcome by the wonder of it. How had she lived all those years without that, without him?

  Above her, she felt Hayden’s body go tense, his head arched back. ‘Jane!’ he shouted out and his voice echoed inside of her, all around her.

  And then she exploded, too, consumed by how he made her feel. She clung to him, feeling as if she tumbled down from the sky.

  Long moments later, once she could breathe again, she slowly opened her eyes. For an instant, she was startled to find the familiar old room around her and not some new, enchanted glade. Hayden lay next to her, his arm tight around her waist. His eyes were closed, his body sprawled around hers in the way she remembered so well. Almost as if they had never been apart at all.

  She closed her eyes again and fell back down into the sweet, drowning warmth of being near Hayden all over again.

  Chapter Ten

  It all appeared to be heading in the right direction.

  Emma stood on her tiptoes to peer between a gap in the maze hedge. They weren’t really talking, but every once in a while they would smile at each other, or touch hands as they passed a trowel or bucket. Emma found it most satisfactory to see those touches linger, the smiles grow longer.

  There was something new, something harmonious, in the air today. Emma wasn’t entirely sure what had changed, or even what had gone wrong in the first place, but it felt most satisfactory. She didn’t want Hayden to go away, leaving Jane all worried-looking and lonely again.

  Plus it distracted Jane so Emma could get on with her own work.

  Emma ducked back into the maze. ‘Come on, Murray,’ she said, hurrying off along the pathway. She took the old journal from the pocket of her apron and carefully flipped the brittle pages open to the sketch she’d found. She was sure she was very close now. The treasure had to be somewhere nearby.