An Unsuitable Bride

by Jane Feather

  Peregrine closed his eyes briefly. What the hell is she playing at? Apart from playing him for a fool? He was always slow to anger, but he felt the first flicker of irritation burn brighter. He looked across the board at her, his blue eyes sharp as daggers. “That’s not going to do you much good.”

  “Oh, dear.” She covered her mouth in distress, her hand lifting to the king, then dropping once more. “Oh, but I can’t change my move.”

  “No,” he agreed. “You can’t.” He moved his bishop. “Check.”

  She cupped her mouth with both hands, looking wide-eyed at him across the board. “I think it’s mate next move, whatever I do.”

  “So it would appear,” he said, his voice cold, his eyes glacial. “You’d have impressed me more if you’d lost with a little more subtlety, ma’am.”

  Alex toppled her king and murmured, “Why would I wish to impress you, sir? I warned you I play a poor game of chess.”

  “You did . . . but you may not know, Mistress Alexandra Hathaway, that you have also thrown down the glove. And I can never resist a challenge.” He pushed back his chair and rose from the board. “One day, we will play chess.” He walked away.

  Alex put the pieces back into the box, unable to dismiss the feeling that she’d overstepped the boundaries she had so carefully set for herself. Instead of boring him with inept play, she had merely offended him. And in truth, she would have been offended herself, she reflected, if anyone had played down to her like that. Damn. Why couldn’t Peregrine just accept that she was out of bounds, that she had nothing to offer him?

  She flexed her shoulders wearily and felt the pad shift. A quick glance around those close to her reassured her that no one was looking at her. The Honorable Peregrine was deep in conversation with Marcus and several other men. She could slide from the salon without being accosted.

  Peregrine was aware of her departure even though he didn’t look at her. For some reason, as she slipped from the room, it seemed emptier.

  “How about dice, my dear fellow?” Marcus shook a cup invitingly.

  Peregrine shook his head. “No, you must excuse me, Marcus. I’ve a mind for an early bed.”

  Marcus shrugged easily. “As you wish, my friend. Don’t look for me before noon tomorrow.” He moved to join a rowdy group of dice players.

  Peregrine moved to the door. His host was deep in a card game where the stakes seemed alarmingly high, and his hostess was playing loo in a lively group by the fire. No one would notice his departure. He slipped from the room and made his way down the drive. It was a glorious moonlit night. It would be autumn soon enough, but tonight summer still lingered in the soft, almost balmy breeze from the sea.

  He walked past the Dower House and veered across the lawn towards the cliff top, enjoying the cool sea breeze on his cheek. His easygoing temper was badly disturbed. Mistress Alexandra Hathaway had heated his generally humorous acceptance of life’s quirks into a bonfire of indignation. How dare she pretend to be such a simpleton? Whatever her reasons for the charade—and he was willing to accept that they could have a vitally important basis—she had no right to treat him like an idiot.

  Alexandra sighed with relief when she reached the safety of her own bedchamber and locked the door behind her. Carefully, she removed all traces of her disguise, put on her nightgown, and sat down on the window seat with her glass of Madeira—the last of her now-discarded bottle—waiting to feel sleepy. But she couldn’t rid herself of unease. She should not have treated Peregrine to such a display of inanity. It was playing with fire. He was no fool, he’d known what she was doing, and it had angered him. Would it, as she hoped, give him a disgust of her, ensure that he stopped probing? Or would it do the opposite? Had she overplayed her hand?

  Oh, why did Peregrine Sullivan have to come to Combe Abbey? Couldn’t the fates just once have left her with an untrammeled path? It was difficult enough to follow as it was. She didn’t ordinarily indulge in self-pity, but for a few moments, Alexandra raged at fate and its injustice to her heart’s content. But then she dashed the tears from her eyes, blew her nose, and faced the realities of her situation once again. All she had to do was keep Mr. Sullivan at arm’s length until he left Combe Abbey, which he would do eventually. He must have another life to go to. A London life of dandified dissipation.

  The reflection brought a reluctant chuckle to her lips. Such a description of Peregrine Sullivan was absurd. He was certainly a beautifully dressed, impeccably mannered aristocrat, but dandified and dissipated? Definitely not. He had the mind and education of a scholar. And therein lay her problem. An aristocratic man-about-town would have no appeal for her at all. She despised them as a group and always had done. But the combination of a keen mind and a powerful physical presence was irresistible. She wanted nothing more than to be in his company, talking with him, exchanging views and pieces of knowledge. There was so much she wanted to know about how he thought, what he liked, what he disliked . . .

  Moonlight flooded the lawns below, and a blackbird burst into full-throated song, as they so often did on a beautiful night at Combe Abbey. It was no wonder they were often mistaken for nightingales, she thought, remembering how she and Sylvia as children had always insisted that the glorious sound could only come from a more exotic creature than a blackbird. They had woven their own Arabian Nights stories lying in bed, imagining flights of fancy to the background music of the songbird beyond their window.

  Voices rose from below as the evening’s guests began to leave, noisily as usual after Stephen’s generous hand with the wine bottles. For all his avarice and penny pinching, he never stinted on his hospitality, and his guests were generally loud and reeling when they finally departed.

  Alexandra listened until the last voice had died away, the last rattle of coach wheels on the driveway had ceased, and the house had fallen silent. Restless, she got up from the window seat. Sleep seemed even further away, and the urge to go out, to walk in the moonlight, was suddenly irresistible. No one was around, the house slept, and she could go down by the backstairs and let herself out through the kitchen door.

  The thought was father to action, and she picked up her cloak, pushed her feet into her slippers, and crept on tiptoe from her chamber.

  The only sounds as she went down the backstairs were the creak of a floorboard and the rustle of mice in the wainscot. The kitchen was in darkness save for the glow from the banked range. The boot boy slept in a blanket roll under the settle alongside the range, but he didn’t stir as Alex trod silently to the kitchen door. She opened it just far enough to let herself out and closed it behind her, hearing only the faint click of the latch. Moonlight flooded the kitchen garden, and she kept in the shadows against the house wall as she made for the gate that would lead to the side path. It was unlikely that anyone was watching from an upstairs window, but she couldn’t afford to take any chances.

  Once on the path, Alex breathed more easily. From the house, she would be no more than a vague moving shadow beneath the trees, and once in the shelter of the orchard, she was free and clear. The soft air was faintly tinged with salt, and she could hear the waves breaking on the shore of the cove.

  Once on the cliff top, she made her way to where a narrow sandy path snaked down the cliff to the beach below. The silver sea rolled through the horseshoe-shaped entrance to the cove, and the cliffs glimmered white. It was a deceptively gentle coastline, but Alex knew that out in the Channel, many an inexperienced sailor had come to grief in the fierce races that ran parallel to the shore.

  She slipped on the rough path but grabbed onto a scrub bush clinging to the sandy soil and regained her footing easily. It was a route down the cliff that she had taken countless times in the past. Once she reached the sand, she kicked off her slippers and walked barefoot to a rocky outcrop at the far side of the cove, curling her toes into the sand with a deep sensual pleasure. She was herself now, and the strain of the pretense slid away from her. She tossed her head, reveling in the freedom of her ha
ir flowing around her face, and she flexed her shoulder blades, feeling the cricks and aches that her daytime posture forced upon her spine melt away as her back straightened. With a light laugh, she dropped her cloak to the sand, caught up the hem of her nightgown, and began to run through the foaming, curling ripples at the water’s edge. She wanted to shout aloud with the sheer freedom of these moments of solitude while the world around her slept.

  So this is what lies beneath the poor, twisted body of the dowdy spinster librarian. Peregrine stood above on the cliff top, watching, transfixed by the sheer joyousness of the figure on the sand below. She was like some newly liberated sprite, he thought with a rush of pleasure. The moonlight caught the tawny and gold shades in the fall of chestnut hair, and her lithe body in its flowing white gown danced through the wavelets with the agility of a fawn.

  Dear God! He’d imagined all sorts of incarnations under the carapace but never anything as strikingly beautiful and alive as this dancing sprite. He had known immediately who she was the moment he had glimpsed the figure slipping and sliding down the cliff on the sandy path. It had been an instinctive leap of recognition, as if he should have known her all along. As he watched, almost breathless with the sheer joy of watching her, a sudden gust of wind from the Channel flattened the thin gown against her body, and for a tantalizing instant, he could make out the outline of her figure, the swell of her breasts, the curve of her hips, the roundness of her backside, the length of her thighs.

  It was only an instant, but his body stirred in response. He stepped back swiftly from the cliff. He didn’t want her to know she was being watched; it would spoil her delight in the liberation of her body and her spirit. How difficult must it be to curb that energy day after day, to restrain the bubble of high spirits that seemed to glow around her like an aura? No, he would not interrupt these moments of her freedom. He would wait until she had had her fill.

  He walked along until he reached the head of the path she had taken down to the beach. He sat down on the rough grass and waited, reasoning that she would ascend by the same route she had descended.

  After a while, Alexandra walked out of the water and sat down on the rock outcrop at the edge of the beach, wriggling her toes as they dried. The breeze had freshened as it often did before the false dawn, and she shivered suddenly. It was time she sought her bed, if she was to be fully in control of herself in the morning, when Mistress Hathaway must take her place on the world’s stage.

  She got up off the rock and began to walk back along the beach to where her discarded cloak and shoes lay. She draped the cloak around her shoulders but carried her shoes. Her sandy feet would only make them uncomfortable. She could clean off the sand when she reached the grass of the cliff top.

  She began the climb up the steep path, pausing now and again to look over her shoulder across at the widening vista of the Channel beyond the horseshoe. The breeze was strengthening by the minute, and she thought she could catch the faintest lightening on the horizon. Maybe she could plead a headache and keep to her room until later in the morning. It was a tempting thought.

  The chestnut head popped up above the edge of the cliff first, and Perry leaned back on his elbows waiting for the rest of her to follow. She clambered up onto the grass, straightened, her hands pressed to the small of her back for a moment, then looked around.

  She stared, dumbfounded, at the figure on the grass a few feet away.

  “Good evening again, Mistress Hathaway . . . but no, I’m certain that can’t be right.” Peregrine stood up in one easy movement, dusting off his breeches with his hat. “ ’Tis not Mistress Hathaway, is it?” He raised his eyebrows with a smile that was filled with the warmth of his earlier delight in her dance upon the beach.

  But Alex saw none of that. With cold clarity, she thought simply, It’s over. All over. All the work, the misery of the charade, the desperation, all for nothing. This man, this complete stranger, had ruined everything. There was nothing left now, nothing she and Sylvia could salvage from the wreck of their lives, and all because this man decided to poke and pry where he had no business. Blind rage filled her.

  She took a step towards him. “Do you have the first idea what you’ve done? You come here cocooned in your own perfect little world where nothing could ever go wrong, where no one would dare to make you uncomfortable, and you decide to amuse yourself, playing with some insignificant creature who couldn’t possibly have a life or feelings of her own.” Without thought, she raised her hand, and her palm cracked against his cheek.

  Peregrine reared back, shocked at the violence of her reaction. He grabbed her wrist as her hand lifted to strike him again. “No.” He forced her hand down, his eyes locked with hers. “No, you won’t do that again.”

  Slowly, under the steady blue gaze, Alex felt the rage die down, leaving only a dull resignation in its place. She pulled at her captive wrist, but his fingers only tightened. “You’ve ruined everything,” she said in a low voice.

  “How?” he demanded. “I certainly haven’t the first idea why you’re deceiving everyone in Dorset, but I haven’t done anything to spoil your game, and I don’t intend to.” He caught her other wrist as her free hand came up, with what intention he didn’t wait to discover. “No . . . just take a hold of yourself. I’m only curious.”

  “You have no right to be curious,” Alex said dully. She tried again to free her hands, but he wouldn’t release his grip.

  “Of course I do. I have every right. I admit I don’t have the right to ruin whatever ’tis that you’re up to, unless, of course, it has some nefarious purpose and as a good citizen I should do so—Does it?” he asked abruptly.

  Alex, to her chagrin, felt her cheeks grow hot. “Of course not,” she muttered.

  Peregrine regarded her thoughtfully. So much for imagining that she would find his presence on the cliff top as pleasant a surprise as he had found hers on the beach. He’d certainly been deluding himself. “So, are you going to tell me what you’re up to, or must I march you to the nearest Justice of the Peace, whom I assume is Sir Stephen?”

  “You would not.” She pulled at her captive hands, a flash of desperation in the gray eyes.

  “No, I would not,” he agreed, regretting his threat. He had no wish to hurt her—quite the opposite. “Will you take a deep breath and tell me your first name, at least?”

  “Alexandra. Let go my hands, please.”

  “You promise not to run?”

  She shook her head impatiently. “Where the hell would I run to?”

  That made him smile again, dissipating the tension. “Much better. Now I feel I’m in the company of the real Alexandra . . . whoever she may be.” He released her wrists.

  Alex rubbed them accusingly, but while his grip had been firm, it had been in no way hurtful, and the gesture failed to have the desired effect.

  “So, how can I be of help?” Peregrine asked.

  “You can pretend this never happened and let me go back to my bed before I have to start all over again,” she stated. Maybe it was an option, or maybe she was clutching at straws.

  “Oh, no, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” He shook his head, but the smile lingered. “I could certainly never pretend I didn’t see you frolicking on the beach, with your hair flying in the breeze.” He reached out and lifted a rich chestnut strand from her shoulder, twisting it around his finger. “Beautiful,” he murmured.

  For a moment, Alexandra was transfixed by the look in his eyes as he trailed his fingers through the cascade of hair. Then his hands moved up to cup her face, and his gaze became even more searching.

  “You are lovely,” he said softly. “Do you know that?” The mystery of Alexandra Hathaway suddenly lost its importance. Her gray eyes seemed to reflect the moonlight, giving them a silvery sheen.

  His mouth hovered over hers, his breath brushing against her cheek. She inhaled his scent, felt her surroundings slipping away, her eyes locked with his, watching his mouth come ever closer, felt herself lean
ing into him, lifting her face for the touch of his lips. Then she jumped back, as if she was too close to a raging fire, and his hands fell to his sides. Her breath was coming fast, and her body felt very strange, her legs quivering as if she’d been running for a very long time.

  “No . . . no, I can’t . . . mustn’t,” she murmured

  He shook his head, the glow in his eyes undiminished. “Can’t, mustn’t . . . why not, Alexandra? You want to . . . I want to kiss you more than anything in the world right now. You are so very lovely, and I want to know you. Won’t you tell me why you’re practicing this insane deception?”

  “There’s nothing insane about it.” The defense was automatic, but she looked at him uncertainly for a moment, before saying hesitantly, “Will you leave me alone, let me do what I have to do?”

  “And if I agree to do so, will you tell me the truth?”

  Alexandra shook her head. “I cannot . . . please, you have to believe me. Leave me be, please.”

  He could not resist the plea in her eyes, which seemed now haunted. He raised a hand and lightly traced the curve of her cheek with his fingertip. “If you insist. For the moment, anyway.”

  Her skin seemed to vibrate under his touch, and she felt strangely breathless. She managed a low “Thank you,” then walked quickly away across the cliff top, almost praying that she had imagined the whole encounter. Maybe she’d open her eyes and find herself in her bed, and it had only been a dream.

  Chapter Six

  Alexandra drew the hood of the cloak over her hair and pushed her still-sandy feet back into her slippers before letting herself back into the kitchen. The household would be up at six, but it was always possible that a scullery maid or the boot boy would already be raking the ashes in the range. But the kitchen was as quiet as when she’d left it, and the boy under the settle still slept.