The fire went out without the help of her tears, though, and soon even the smoke began to clear. It rose away on the night air to mingle with the smoke that hung thick in London’s skies. Catherine sat down in the grass alongside Marie, exhausted. She heard Cook say, “It was the kitchen chimney. We’ve not had it cleaned in a donkey’s age, and look what it’s come to now.”
Catherine could not feel even a hint of horror at the thought of such a loss coming from a foolish oversight. She simply lay back on the grass and let the early morning dew begin to wash her clean.
* * *
“Catherine! Get off that wet lawn at once!”
Her mother’s voice woke her abruptly from whatever bit of sleep she had been able to snatch. It could not have been later than one in the morning, but despite her moment of sleep, Catherine felt as if she had been awake a year. She stood at once, before Alex could offer her his hand to help her up.
His face was covered in smoke dust, as no doubt hers was as well. She looked at the house her great-grandfather had built, and sighed to see the mess the fire had left behind. She would have to inquire in the morning of Mr. Philips, that he might send someone to see if the structure was sound. The thought of all that the morning would bring weighed on her like a curse. Her shoulders slumped under the heavy load.
Alex took her hand, his black leather glove soft and tempting against her skin. “Whatever it is, don’t think about it now. Come home with me and sleep. We will deal with your burdens tomorrow.”
His dark eyes warmed her from the inside out, even as the heat of his touch warmed her palm. She wished fervently and forever that she might lay her burdens on his shoulders, that she might tell him all and cast her future and her life in with his. But she knew her duty. She knew what her father would say, if he were there. And she would hold to honor, for the last vestige of what he had taught her would keep him still alive, if only in her heart.
She squeezed Alex’s hand once, and then let him go.
Thirty-two
Mary Elizabeth greeted them in the foyer of the Duchess of Northumberland’s house with cups of warm cider. There was a maid apiece to lead Margaret and their mother up to their guest rooms, which Mary Elizabeth already had prepared.
“You are welcome to stay as long as you like, as long as you must, and beyond,” Mary Elizabeth said, her brogue coming out, whether from exercising hospitality as was fit for a Scottish woman, or from exhaustion due to the late hour, Catherine could not say.
Mary Elizabeth went on. “This house is like a museum or a tomb, it is so big and silent. What’s that grand tomb those heathens built in India, Robbie?” she asked her brother.
“The Taj Mahal,” he replied, sleep rumpled but handsome.
“Aye, whatever that may mean. It’s a great big place that looks like a palace, but it holds only one dead woman. This house is like that. So welcome.” Mary Elizabeth hugged Catherine tight, and took Mrs. Middlebrook and Margaret into her arms as well. Mary Elizabeth brooked no argument as they were ushered up the staircase to their separate but adjoining rooms. After the scare they’d had, Catherine had no doubt that they would sleep in the same bed. She did not mention that to Mary Elizabeth, who seemed pleased to have at least three more rooms in the empty house filled up.
All the servants had been taken in as well, save for Jim, who stayed with the house to keep looters away. Catherine felt herself taken up and comforted by Mary Elizabeth’s busyness, but even so, she felt Alex’s eyes on her, and she wondered how she was going to sleep even a moment in the same house as he. Her earlier exhaustion had fled as soon as they entered the grand house. The heat of his gaze followed her, and made her light-headed and lighthearted all the way up the staircase.
She bathed in one of the three bathing rooms in the house, all of which had heated water flowing down from a cistern in the roof. Catherine had rarely known such luxury, but she did not savor it, bathing quickly.
The soft soap in the duchess’s bath smelled like jasmine, the fragrance heady and almost overpowering. She smoothed the scent over her skin, washing away all soot and dirt. And she thought of Alex, and how his hands might feel on her skin.
She shocked herself with this line of thought, but her night had taken on a truly unreal quality, as if she had stepped somehow outside of time, outside of her life. She knew that she must marry Lord Farleigh. And she did not have the strength to wait, to have a decent, sensible engagement with its rounds of parties and two weeks of dressmaking, and then a formal wedding with Margaret as bridesmaid. She must leave Alex Waters behind, and begin a new life. She would go to Lord Farleigh, to Arthur, as soon as the sun was up and ask him to run away with her.
His mother would no doubt disapprove if they fled to Gretna Green, but once wedded and bedded, the scandal would subside in the light of Lord Farleigh’s staid, calm ways. Indeed, a runaway marriage might even impress some of his friends, and show them that he was not always the boring man they no doubt thought him to be. She knew that if she asked, Lord Farleigh would take her to Scotland and marry her over an anvil, no questions asked.
She had first liked him for that very biddableness. Though Alex had shown her that she had a taste for another kind of man altogether, her personal tastes did not signify. She would marry Lord Farleigh, and he would care for her and hers for the rest of their lives. Their debt to him would be paid, and all would be as it should.
All of that would happen in the light of the new day. Catherine dried herself with the duchess’s thick bathing sheets. She would shirk no longer, and that was a promise. Come morning, she would run away from Alex and all the temptation he offered, and flee to Gretna Green with Lord Farleigh. With Arthur.
But the notion of the calm, quiet marriage she would soon build with Lord Farleigh brought a strange devastation that shook her to her core. She pushed that devastation aside. Like all grief, it would fade in time to something less horrible. But if she had something to live on for the rest of her days, something to remember of Alex that went beyond a touch of his hand on hers, that went beyond a few stolen kisses…
She took off her mother’s pearl and Lord Farleigh’s ring. She slipped them into the bag Mary Elizabeth had given her that was filled with underthings, a pair of stays, a nightgown, and a pressed day gown that no doubt now was rumpled. She slipped on the night rail and braided her hair as if going to sleep. But she would not sleep. Not that night, perhaps not ever again.
Her blood sang as if she were going into battle as, with bag in hand, she knocked quietly on Mary Elizabeth’s bedroom door.
“Are you frightened from the fire?” Mary Elizabeth asked, still wide-awake from tending to her guests.
“No,” Catherine answered. “May I come in?”
“Of course.”
Facing her friend, Catherine found her voice gone. She cleared her throat and took a sip of the cider offered her.
“I am going away in the morning,” she said at once.
Mary Elizabeth frowned. “But you’ve only just arrived. You truly are welcome to stay as long as you’d like. I wish you’d never leave, truth be told. This mausoleum needs livening up, and we are just the two ladies to do it.”
Catherine laughed at the loyalty and sweetness reflected in Mary Elizabeth’s face. “I’ve never had a friend before. I am grateful for you.”
“Well, it’s high time you did. Now, what is this nonsense about going away?”
“I am running away in the morning. With Lord Farleigh.”
Catherine watched as a shadow crossed her friend’s face. Mary Elizabeth clearly wanted to ask about Alex, and about her feelings for him, but out of loyalty to Catherine, she did not.
“And where will you go?”
“Gretna Green,” Catherine said, her voice growing stronger with the telling. “We’ll marry across the anvil.”
“Running to the Lowlands to be wed,” Mary
Elizabeth said, raising one brow. “I had heard you English did such things. But why not marry here? There are plenty of priests about.”
“The marriage laws are strict.”
“But not in Scotland?”
“No.”
“I had always thought a handfasting with a priest to bless it was sufficient for any woman and man, so I suppose that’s what you’ll have when you cross the border.” Mary Elizabeth straightened her shoulders and gave Catherine a swift, sure hug. “I don’t understand your choice, but I’ll support it. I’ll look after your mother and sister as if they were my own. Robbie will only laugh at the foolishness of English girls, but Alex might take offense. He’s taken quite a shine to you. I think he’ll come after you.”
“We’ll be gone just after dawn,” she answered. “He won’t be able to catch us.”
Mary Elizabeth did not look convinced, but she did not voice any more objections. She took out a leather sheath that held half a dozen throwing knives—the small, light kind that she had taught Catherine to throw in the duchess’s ballroom what felt like a lifetime ago. She wrapped three in a heavy bit of flannel and handed them to Catherine.
“Keep one of these in your reticule at all times, and one in your boot. It’s best if you hide the third somewhere in the carriage where you can get at it easily.”
“Thank you, Mary, but I don’t need knives.”
“Aye, and you do. Your man looks to be a good sort, but I doubt he’d be good in a fight. You’ll be wanting speed, so he won’t be bringing outriders with him, as any sensible man should when traveling among the English. Lowlifes and ruffians abound on the North Road, and none mean to do you good. You’ll take these knives and keep them by you, so you’ve got some defense, if some evildoer looks to harm you.”
Catherine tucked the knives into her leather satchel, and slipped on the half boots Mary Elizabeth handed her. She did not lace them, but found that they fit.
“The rest of my clothes will fit you, too. My stays lace up the front, because I can’t stand to have a woman dress me. You’ll get used to them, and it looks as if you’ll need them where you’re going. I don’t suppose your man will bring a lady’s maid along on his honeymoon.”
Mary Elizabeth laughed at that, and Catherine wondered what she thought was funny, but did not question her. But dawn was coming in less than three hours, and she had one more stop to make.
“Thank you,” she said, kissing her friend on the cheek.
She left Mary Elizabeth, and stood for one long moment in the dark hall outside the bedroom door. She should go to the guest room only two doors down. She needed to rest a bit, if not sleep, before she dressed for the day ahead. But she did not. Instead, she turned the other way.
She walked down the corridor to the room she had dreamed of too many times. She had been in it only once before, but she found it with ease, like a lost pigeon coming home.
Catherine did not knock, but when she found the door to Alex Waters’s room unlocked, she turned the knob and stepped inside.
Thirty-three
Once he watched Catherine walk up the stairs ahead of him, Alex went to take his own bath. Sadly, all three bathing rooms were occupied, so he stood outside the one that held his angel and listened to her splash.
He would go to the kitchen, wash himself off in the sink, then take an urn up to his dressing room and finish washing himself there. He did not need warmed water, for it was his soap that would get him clean. The water down south would never run as cold as the burn next to his father’s castle, not if a new ice age came and froze the world.
Still, he lingered outside her bathing room, feeling like a cad and a bounder. He stayed and listened, thinking of her smooth skin with the water running off of it as she stood up in her bath. He left then. The pain in his loins was a good enough punishment for his thoughts. He would never touch her. Not until he had his ring on her finger.
Which, from the size of the pain he was in, had better be soon.
He did not sleep after washing up, of course, but listened to the sounds of the house finally settling down. He stared at the wooden canopy above his bed, at the crest carved into the walnut. He supposed some Northumberland duke had commissioned it during Elizabeth I’s reign, to remind the guest in question whose house they slept in. He sighed and wondered how much longer he would have to wait before he could marry his girl, and go home.
And that was when she walked into his room, the firelight gleaming on the pure white of her borrowed dressing gown, and he could no longer think at all.
“Catherine, why are you wearing my sister’s boots?”
It was the only thing that Alex could force himself to say. His tongue was cleaving to the roof of this mouth, and he thought for a moment that he might choke on it.
His angel looked down at her footwear, her borrowed wrapper and nightgown still tight about her. Her soft, clean hair was braided, and his blood-deprived mind thought that he could sense a touch of jasmine on the air, much like his mother’s favorite soap. He focused on that scent, but instead of dampening his ardor as it surely should have done, his ardor transformed the scent into something altogether new, something that had nothing to do with any woman save this one standing before him.
He would have her, and he knew it. He would make love to her, then marry her and ask God for forgiveness afterward.
He sat up, careful so that the bedclothes would not fall too low and frighten her away. As it was, she looked up at him, her eyes as round as saucers, taking in the expanse of his bare chest, where it shone in the dark above the bedclothes. She seemed to want to pull her eyes away, as any decent young lady would, but she didn’t do it. Alex watched the pulse jump in her throat like the sudden leap of a rabbit in the garden. He needed to say something soothing, so she wouldn’t flee.
“Why don’t you step into my sitting room, Catherine, and I will be out in a moment.”
His angel swallowed hard, her eyes still on his body. He almost took her under him then and there; it was clear she wanted him. But he was a gentleman, and she a lady, and they had more than one thing to settle still between them.
She, who was usually so graceful, stumbled a little over her unlaced boots as she slipped into his parlor. He did not take long, but drew on trousers and the shirt he had left by for the laundry woman, and walked out to her barefoot.
But his girl was brave as well as bold, for she sat where he had first set her in that room, on the settee close by his favorite chair. He sat beside her, so that she might get used to the scent of him, and accept his nearness before he touched her. She stiffened in fear at first, but when he did not reach for her, as he so often had in the past, she relaxed against the cushions behind her and sighed.
“You should be sleeping, Catherine. Why are you up and about, wandering the duchess’s house in a wrapper and boots?”
“And a bag,” his angel said, gesturing to a leather satchel that sat oddly by his door. “I’m going away tomorrow, but I wanted to tell you good-bye first.”
He loved the singular turn of her mind, and the odd fancies she gave herself over to. He knew that he would love exploring those turns of mind, and talking her out of her fancies, for the rest of his life.
Now that he had her alone in his room, half-dressed, he would never let her go. He would be pleased to escort her to his Lordship of Love’s house on the morrow, that she might set him down easy, and explain things to him. And if she did not wish to do so, Alex would visit the young lord himself, and put him at his ease. He would call on the Waterses’s charm of Glenderrin fame. With any luck, the man wouldn’t get too hotheaded and try to shoot him with a dueling pistol, or brain him with a walking stick.
Alex looked at the curves of his angel in the firelight. The man would be right to brain him and steal her for himself. Of course, as a man and a Scot, Alex would not allow it. Still, he had a bit of sympat
hy for the English bastard, now that he had won.
All this passed through his mind in an instant, and then he rose slowly from the settee so as not to frighten her, and knelt beside her feet on the plush carpet.
She looked alarmed in truth then, and he realized that the rutting bastard must have proposed to her that day in the woods, kneeling down much as he was now. He set such an unpleasant thought aside, and smiled up at her. At the sight of his smile, she relaxed a little, and he started talking.
“I am sorry to hear you’re going,” he said. “But you’re not leaving this instant, are you? Not in my sister’s best dressing gown?”
“I—I suppose not.”
Catherine looked down at her attire as if seeing it for the first time. She drew the top of the robe together tighter under her chin, which served only to draw the fabric close against her magnificent breasts. She was not wearing stays, and he could see the outline of her softness pressed against the cotton and silk. He swallowed hard and managed to keep his voice even, though it had grown a bit raspy.
“Well, take your rest awhile here. Have a sip of cider with me.” His hand slid down her leg, from her knee to her toes, and she did not jump away, but shivered. He looked up at her and saw the heat in his eyes reflected in her own. He did not speed up his movements, though, or pull her down to him on the carpet as he so sorely wished to. He would make her first time a time of pure bliss, if he was lucky enough to get permission to touch her.
Had she been any other woman, alone in his room with him in the dark of night, he would have been sure of the outcome. But it was his angel sitting here beside him. He never knew with any certainty what she might do. She might fly into a fit of irritation suddenly if he moved too quick. She might flounce out, leaving both boots and bag behind.
As she took a deep breath, and her breasts rose and fell above him, he knew he could not bear it if she left him flat. Not this time.
How to Seduce a Scot Page 20