by Nicole Byrd
“He’s too sly to be that easily trapped,” the viscount continued. “As we spread the word to gather your neighbors together, he would be bound to hear and suspect our plan, and he would simply slip away, coming back later when the good folk were tired of lying in wait for him.”
Adrian sounded too depressingly pragmatic. Maddie lay her cheek against his side, feeling the warmth of his skin, the slight sheen of sweat, which they had well earned. Every night he showed her something new. Every night she found that she could enjoy loving him even more, and every night she thought how much more she would miss him.
Today she washed and dressed quickly. Almost running down the staircase, she found the viscount still before her in the dining room. Bess was setting the first plates of food on the sideboard.
“Morning, miss,” she said. “All excited, I guess ye are, about the big day tomorrow.”
“Yes, indeed,” Maddie said, but she looked at the viscount as she spoke, smiling into his eyes.
He gave her an answering smile back. When the servant left the room, he bent and gave her a fast, hard kiss before anyone else came into the room. They parted just in time; she heard the faint creak of wheels as her father’s chair came down the hall, with Felicity soon behind him.
Her cheeks a little warm, Maddie spun to put eggs and bread on her plate and to give her color time to cool before she turned to tell her father good morning.
“A lovely day outside,” Mr. Applegate said, greeting them all.
Maddie poured her father a cup of tea and then fixed him a plate, putting on his favorite foods.
When she set it down, he gave her a slight pat on the cheek. “Not much longer now,” he said, smiling.
“No, Papa,” she said, smiling back at him, though her heart dropped a little at his words with their double meaning.
One more day.
The eggs had suddenly turned tasteless in her mouth. After tomorrow, if the shooter tried again, would Adrian pack up and ride away?
Could she persuade him to take her with him?
No, then who would tend to her father? She had promised her mother she would take care of her father. How could she break a deathbed oath?
She had never thought all her sisters would marry. Of course, poor Lauryn had been widowed so young, but she would likely marry again.
So it really was up to her. Since Papa’s accident…and it didn’t matter if he wasn’t her birth father, he had saved her mother from scandal, brought Madeline up, and treated her lovingly; she loved him like a father—he was her father!
She couldn’t walk away and leave him.
But her heart was going to break in two when Adrian rode away.
Oh, God, why did this have to happen?
Maddie put her fork down. She couldn’t see her plate. She blinked hard—she could not disgrace herself, nor upset her father, by crying over her eggs and ham.
The ridiculousness of that drove a little of her melancholy away.
She sipped her tea to avoid having to make conversation and let the talk flow around her. Her father was talking about a neighbor’s cow, it seemed. She had nothing to add to that.
Felicity chatted about the best way to churn butter, and Maddie nodded absently, though she had few thoughts on that subject, either.
When everyone had finished eating, the two men disappeared in the direction of her father’s study, and she and Felicity helped Bess clear away. When Maddie came back to the sitting room, she was surprised to see the viscount there with her father’s chess set arranged upon the small card table.
“Have you moved your game to the sitting room?”
“Your father suggested you might like a lesson in chess,” Adrian told her, grinning.
“I can’t imagine why,” she said. “He tried to teach me when I was twelve, and I drove us both to a nervous frenzy.”
She sat down across the table from him nonetheless, happy for any excuse to gaze at him. “And where is Felicity?”
“Ah, I suggested that Mrs. Barlow might like to discuss with your father the book of ancient history that she borrowed earlier from his collection. She was happy to agree. I wanted to assure him some congenial company, so she is sitting in his study with him just now.”
“Thus leaving us alone in the sitting room?” she suggested. “I begin to see why you are so good at chess! You are a master of strategy, my lord.”
“That, too,” he agreed, his eyes glinting with laughter. “And while I fear we shall have to be—ah—prudent in our behavior, at least we can have a few minutes of private conversation.”
So he, too, wanted any scrap of comfort he could get, Maddie thought. In an odd way, that cheered her. Adrian was also dreading their approaching separation.
Quite without thinking, she leaned forward toward him over the board.
“The white pawn always moves first,” the viscount said. “Do you have any faint interest in chess, by the way?”
“Not the slightest,” she said.
“Good, then I will tell you instead that your breasts look quite lovely from this vantage point,” he pointed out.
She blushed and straightened. Her neckline was not very low, but still she had been bending over the table.
“No, no, that removes them too much from my view,” he said, his tone teasing.
“Very well.” She leaned forward again. “Anything else you like about the vista?”
“Everything,” he said. “You didn’t do that half-braid thing with your hair today.”
She was almost surprised at how observant he was. “No, I was rushing, so I just pinned it up, and not very well, I’m afraid. I’m sorry it’s a bit untidy.”
“I think it’s lovely any way you do it. But I admit, my fingers are longing to pull out those pins that are showing themselves so temptingly.” He gestured, and she was surprised to see that he was gazing dreamily at her long hair. “I’m thinking I could release it and let it fall free about your shoulders. I have just realized that even at night, I’ve only seen you with your hair—and it’s a lovely golden brown hue, you know, soft and gleaming and wonderful to touch—I’ve only seen it braided or somehow restrained. I’d love to see it free about your shoulders.”
For some reason, this made her blush again; the thought of her hair flowing unrestrained seemed very sensual.
If her father came in…
Oh, for heaven’s sake, she told herself. It was only hair.
If he wanted to see her hair flowing…
She reached back and found the first pin.
“Oh, no, let me!” Adrian said. He stood and reached across the small table, and his eyes danced. She smelled his clean linen and the scent of male flesh as he brushed her cheek with his arm; she shut her eyes and enjoyed his closeness. Very gently, he pulled out another pin, and another until she felt the weight of her hair shift, and the knot of hair gave way and slipped free of its mesh. She shook the snood and the rest of the pins away.
“Oh, fair lady,” Adrian said, his voice low and husky, almost a caress. “You look as if you’ve just swept out of some fairy tale, as you did that night in the gazebo when I thought you might be a wood nymph, come to tempt me into faery land. You stole my heart then, and you’ve never let it go.”
“I never want to let you go!” Although she felt her throat ache, Maddie smiled up at him, and he leaned to kiss her lips, firmly, sweetly, his tongue probing and lingering for a faint delicious moment.
Then he stroked his fingers through her thick locks, weaving them through her hair and holding her head back so he could kiss her again, and again, and kiss her yet once more, while Maddie put her arm behind his head and pulled him toward her so that she could kiss him back properly.
“You are so incredibly lovely, sweet Madeline,” he murmured. He touched her cheek, and the light touch of his fingertips caressing her skin sent goose bumps up and down her spine.
She swallowed as he moved slowly away, but he traced his hand lightly down her cheek, aro
und her lips, over her chin, each touch sparking sensations that warmed her, chilled her, thrilled her.
He moved one hand down to cradle her breast, straining through the thin muslin and aching for his touch. Deep inside her, other parts of her body were wanting him, wanting completions they could not achieve in her sitting room in clear daylight.
Oh, dear, they should never have started this, she thought. She would be aching all day until he could come to her tonight.
He grinned at her. “We shall drive ourselves into Bedlam at this rate,” he told her. “But it’s a better game than chess, you must admit.”
She laughed aloud.
Then he turned his head, and she heard it, too: the slight creak of her father’s wheeled chair in the hallway, and then Felicity, bless her, speaking rather loudly.
“Of course, the Greeks were much more accomplished architects, don’t you think?”
She would be trying to give them warning.
Maddie hastily grabbed some hairpins from the chessboard and twisted her thick mane of hair back and up into a hasty knot once more, untidy though it might be.
She was so concerned with that—thank goodness nothing had been unbuttoned, she thought—that only when her father and Felicity were actually inside the room did she remember that she and Adrian were supposed to be playing chess. They had never moved a game piece.
She looked down at the board, expecting it to give them away. She saw instead that several pieces were arranged across the squares, and Adrian sat with his hand on a bishop as if he had been seriously contemplating a move. Trust her fiancé to remember the details, she thought with relief.
“Who is winning?” her father asked jovially from across the room.
“Not me, I assure you,” she said. “I fear that my skill at chess remains the same as it was the last time I tried to learn.” And that was the literal truth!
The viscount smiled at her. “You are too harsh on yourself,” he said. “I think you have many skills.”
“Thank you, my lord,” she said, trying to keep her tone demure and not blush. “You’re too kind.” And when her father turned his chair and his attention away, she favored her mischievous fiancé with a playful kick under the table.
He grinned back at her.
They were soon drawn into a general conversation about the history the other two had been discussing. Madeline found once again that the viscount was as informed on as many subjects as her father, and conversant on all her favorite topics.
Suddenly it seemed the day had flown, and they were sitting down to dinner. As she looked out into the gathering dusk, her heart seemed to contract. Time had defeated her again. She had wanted to stop it, gather it together, hold it back—and always it ran before her. Soon it would take Adrian away.
After dinner, they were about to bring out the cards when there was a knock at the front door. Bess went to answer, and Maddie heard the sound of men’s voices. She moved to the doorway of the sitting room and looked out to see what was happening. The viscount had already brushed past her; he seemed to be listening to a couple of villagers who stood with hats in hand and eager expressions. Eyes bright with anticipation, they talked quickly.
What was this about? Maddie watched as Adrian took coins from his pocket and handed over an unseen amount to each man, to their obvious satisfaction. Then he spoke to them again briefly and shut the door behind them when they turned on their heels and hurried out.
Wearing a thoughtful expression, he turned, too, though he seemed headed for the stairwell instead of back to the sitting room. When he saw her waiting in the doorway, his brow cleared.
“Good,” Adrian said, “you are here. Please excuse me to your father and Mrs. Barlow. I have some news I have to check out.”
“What is it?” she asked, alarmed.
“While not as extensive as your idea of rallying the neighborhood, I did try to do what I could to find our mysterious intruder, my love. I have hired a dozen villagers to watch at selected points around the area ever since we have had reason to suspect that my cousin was here. I hoped they might note an unknown person lurking, one preparing to execute a surprise attack.”
“Oh, wonderful,” Madeline cried, “and they have located him?”
“They think they have found traces of an outsider, a man whose appearance matches the description given by Mrs. Barlow,” Adrian told her.
“Oh?” Maddie paused, puzzled. “But I don’t see the connection between your mad cousin and Mrs. Barlow’s gypsy.”
“Nor do I, frankly, but right now, we can’t wait until we figure it out,” the viscount pointed out. “I have to go; I will be back as soon as I can.”
“Oh, take care,” she said, wanting so badly to reach out and hold him back that she had to curl her hands into fists to keep herself from grabbing him.
He leaned forward and gave her a quick kiss, turned and opened the front door, and stepped into the darkness.
And he was gone.
She went back to the sitting room and told her father and Felicity, and then, unable to sit still, went to the kitchen and helped Bess make tea. She felt numb inside. If the viscount could find his cousin and, with the help of the men he had hired, bring him to the local magistrate and see him arrested, they might at last be free of his long-standing threat, the cousin’s enormous, unbalanced hatred. Then she and Adrian would be free to live together as man and wife and enjoy their love for each other—at least until the pieces of the bullet in his body migrated to his heart and killed him.
The idea of a silent killer biding its time within his own body made her want to weep. Even if they found the traitorous cousin, now there was a second and more deadly enemy. How could they defeat the unbeatable foe he carried within him?
Deal with one enemy at a time, she told herself. She couldn’t think about more than that, not now.
She paced up and down the threadbare rug in the sitting room. Her father and Felicity watched with pity in their eyes. But she could no longer attempt to cloak the anxiety that filled her mind and overflowed her body until she thought she might pound her fists against the wall and scream until in far-off London, the poor mad king himself—deaf or no—could hear her.
“Would you like more tea?” Felicity asked, her voice anxious and her forehead creased. She looked ready to wring her hands, too.
“No, thank you.” Feeling guilty about inflicting such distress on her friend and family, Maddie tried to sit down and not try her friend’s composure as well as her own, but she found it impossible. In a moment, she popped up again, unable to sit quietly when she had no idea what was happening to the viscount. Was he safe? She could picture Adrian gliding up to surprise his cousin and being waylaid himself instead. Shots ringing out, blood flowing, Adrian in distress, his lifeblood slipping away. She put her hands to her head trying to prevent these horrible images from flooding through her mind.
“Perhaps a sip or two of brandy?” her father suggested. He also sounded concerned as he watched her wander up and down.
When she shook her head, he added, “I’m sure the viscount is proceeding with courageous and intelligent caution, Madeline.”
She smiled, knowing that her father was trying to soothe her. But she could not be still, and she continued to pace, looking out the windows into the dark night, going now and then into the hall to stare at the front door and listen for the sound of the knocker, which remained adamantly still.
When the eleventh hour struck on the clock in the sitting room, her father said, “I think we should all at least prepare for bed. You still have a wedding scheduled for tomorrow, my dear.”
“To have a successful wedding, one needs both a bride and a groom,” Maddie pointed out, trying to smile at her feeble attempt at a jest, but finding herself unable to lift her lips—they felt as if they were frozen, numb.
“Lord Weller will no doubt return soon,” her father said, his tone firm. “But in the meantime, you should attempt to get some sleep.”
Just let him be safe, she prayed. God keep him safe!
When she was ready for bed, she opened her bedroom door again so that she could more easily hear any sound from downstairs, nor could she bear to quench the candle on her bedside table.
She climbed into bed and sat there, her back against the pillows and a book on her knees, but she could not focus on the lines of print. Instead she listened hard to every small sound that resonated through the quiet house.
It seemed as if hours—no, days—had passed when at last, she heard the thud of the door knocker. Throwing a wrapper over her nightgown, Maddie ran to the staircase. As she hurried down the steps, she heard other doors open. Everyone had been listening for the knocker, too, it seemed. But she beat them all to the front door.
When she pulled back the bolt, she trembled with nervous anticipation until she saw that it was the viscount who stood in the doorway.
With a wordless cry of joy, she threw herself into his arms. He was icy cold and smelled of outdoors and sweat and horsehair, and she did not care at all.
“Here, here,” he murmured. “I am cold and muddy, my love; you will be drenched through and through.”
She could indeed feel the icy wetness of his clothes penetrating her nightgown and chilling her body, but she didn’t mind. Just the fact that he was alive and apparently unhurt left her nearly delirious with happiness.
“I was so worried!” she told him, her voice trembling. “I was so afraid for you.”
“I know.” He stroked her hair. “Here now, you’ve bundled up that lovely hair again,” he said into her ear.