There was amusement in her voice and he didn’t quite know what to make of that. He smiled to cover his discomfort and said, “Please, the title is less than a courtesy. You must call me Robin, especially as Marilla has announced that we are all on first-name terms.”
Some of the light faded in her extraordinary eyes. “I should have liked to call you Robin at your own behest, not someone else’s.”
“It is my request. I should like you to call me Robin.” He heard the slight imploring note in his voice, but could do nothing to prevent it. He wanted to hear her say his name in every mood: shouted in glee, whispered in intimacy, spoken with easy familiarity.
“Only if you will call me Cecily.”
“Your father would hardly approve.” The words slipped out unintended. When had he turned into such a pedant? But she really shouldn’t be giving the use of her Christian name to a rake.
“But he is not here, and I would never presume to know of what he would approve or disapprove,” she said with feigned haughtiness. “I find it rather audacious that you do.”
Her sophistry delighted him almost as much as her mental adroitness. Besides, what harm if they played at friendship . . . or even something more, for a few short hours?
“I see I have no choice but to cede to your greater knowledge, La— Cecily. Until I have been told otherwise by the gentleman himself, I will be ruled by your superior understanding. Now, whatever are you doing in these inhospitable climes so early in the morning?”
“As I told you, I am looking for something to wear. Something that fits better than this,” she said, tugging at the sagging skirts. “The hunt has led me here.”
“I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed,” Robin said. “This part of the castle has been uninhabited for generations. Anything worth keeping was removed long ago.”
“Drat.”
He grinned at this small imprecation. “Exactly. I’m sorry.”
“No matter. I’ll just look elsewhere. There must be something somewhere.”
He doubted it, but why dampen her spirits when she was so obviously enjoying her treasure hunt?
“Did you have in mind somewhere particular to look?” he asked.
“Not really. I’ve already been in every room in this corridor.”
“Then perhaps you’d allow me to escort you back to a more likely hunting ground? Finovair might not be very large but it can be confusing. Purposely so.”
“Why is that?”
“It’s all part of our national heritage. All those Jacobites and Hanoverians littering the countryside, plotting and counterplotting, ferreting out secrets and squirreling others away. Small wonder Scottish castles tend to be warrens of secret passages and blind ends, priest bolts and lovers’ cupboards. And the Fergusons were the worst of the lot. As such it only stands to reason their stronghold would be one of the most abstruse. Yes. You really had best let me accompany you—”
She held up her hand, laughing. “Have done, Robin! I am convinced.”
Had he sounded so eager? He must indeed be bewitched. His sangfroid was legendary.
“And by all means, I accept,” she went on. “I should hate to end up lost in these walls for eternity. Take me where you will. I am yours!”
His heart lurched at her words and he glanced at her to see if she understood what she’d offered, but not a bit of caution clouded her face. She smiled sunnily up at him, sovereign in her consequence. No one would dare assail her. After all, she was an earl’s daughter.
Foolish girl, she was far too lovely to make such assumptions. After all, she’d been abducted, hadn’t she? Kidnapped and dragged through a storm to a heathenish, frozen castle for the express purpose of becoming its heir’s bride.
His bride.
The thought hovered with tantalizing effect in the foreground of his imagination. What if he stayed and wooed her? Seduced her? Used all his much-vaunted skill to try to win her for his own? Would she succumb?
Would he?
She tucked her hand into the crook of his arm, unaware of the profligate impulses shivering through him.
“I admit,” she said, “the idea of being lost here does conjure an amusing image: my poor spirit moaning dolefully through the walls at your descendants, only to have them shout back that I deserve my fate for not accepting your escort. ” She peeked up at him through sooty lashes. “At least I assume that any descendants of yours would have scant pity for fools who don’t know enough to take what was offered.”
He checked, startled by an interpretation of her words that she could not possibly have meant. She gazed at him, all innocence and trust. He swallowed. “You think you know me well enough to predict my unborn descendants’ dispositions?” he asked, discovering that he liked the idea that she knew him; he even liked the idea that she thought she knew him. Though, of course she couldn’t. His lovers had often complained that his laughter and wit deflected any hope of achieving any intimacy that didn’t involve the flesh.
But here, at this moment, with this girl in her oversized dress and bed-hanging shawl, looking like a child who had raided her grandmother’s wardrobe to play dress-up, walking along a hall where frost rimed the windows and crept like silvery lichen along the ceiling as their breath made little shrouds in the air, in this strange fairy-tale land of predawn glitter and soft, frosted sheen, Cecily’s assumption of familiarity felt warm and companionable and . . . right.
Perhaps he needn’t avoid her after all. Perhaps they really could just be friends . . .
But then he glanced at her, just a glance, and noted the way the angled light limned her full lower lip, the elegant line of her nose, the glossy sheen of her rich dark locks, and the small shadowed vale just visible above where she’d tucked the velvet material into her bodice and realized, no, they could not just be friends.
“Am I presumptuous?” she asked, not looking the least abashed. “I’m sorry.”
“Not at all,” he said easily. “I am just appalled that my predictability is so blatant you can foretell what traits my descendants will inherit.”
“You are kind, Robin,” she said, studying him.
Her words made him uneasy. He was a rake and a ne’er-do-well. And a pauper. She must know that.
He drew her back to his side and they proceeded at a leisurely pace, as if they were strolling in St. James Park during the height of the season, not a frozen corridor in a ruined castle in the dead of winter.
“You might well be correct about my presumed offspring,” he said. “If future Comtes de Rocheforte were to be found lounging about the castle. But I doubt they will be.”
“How so?” she asked. “The older gentleman gave me to understand that you will inherit Finovair.”
“The older gentleman? Oh. You mean Taran. Hardly a gentleman, though definitely older. And yes, my mother having been so shortsighted as to have given birth to me prematurely, and thus two weeks before Byron’s mother bore him, Taran has deemed me next in line to have this great pile foisted upon.”
He spoke with a great show of amused indifference. “But even I at my most persuasive—and I can be most persuasive”—he angled an amused glance at her, and was rewarded with a faint blush—“even I would be hard-pressed to talk any lady into living here, let alone raising her children in such a place.”
“Why?” She stopped and looked up at him, by all appearances sincerely confused.
Why? His gaze swept down the length of ruined gallery. A vine had crept through a crack in one of the windows and hung bare and twisted as a witch’s finger from the ceiling, pointing accusingly at a broken chair tipping woozily against a water-stained wall. She was being disingenuous. She had to be.
“The latest fashions,” he said with supreme insouciance, “eschew blue lips. Or so I am told. And I refuse to have an unfashionable wife.”
She burst into laughter and he could not help but notice that her lips were, indeed, touched with a violet hue. Wordlessly, he shrugged out of his jacket and, without
asking permission, draped it over her shoulders.
She backed away a step as he performed this unasked-for service, clearly startled by the liberties he’d taken. He took the opportunity for even more, tucking the collar around her neck and gently teasing a tress of hair free from under his jacket. Then he smoothed it along her shoulder, smiling down at her as he slowly followed her retreat, step by step. Her shoulders bumped into the wall behind her.
“My pardon, Lady Cecily,” he said, coming to his senses. “I am simply doing my part to see that Scotland stays au courant with London. Your lips were turning blue, m’dear.”
He didn’t mean to do anything more. But her golden eyes trapped him in time, and all he was aware of was the beating of his heart, the sound of his own labored breathing, and then, amazingly, impossibly, she leaned forward, tipping her head back, her eyelids slipping shut, and her lips pursed in a delicious invitation.
A kiss. Something to remember her by. What harm a kiss?
He could no more have declined that wordless offer than he could refuse to breathe. He lowered his head and carefully, gently pressed his lips to hers.
Chapter 22
Desire exploded at the instant of contact, shooting like lightning through Robin. He stepped closer, keeping his hands knotted in fists at his sides, wanting more but certain that if he reached for her, she would bolt.
More kisses. That was all he sought. It was hardly anything, nothing at all, really, just . . . everything.
She made some lovely, half-surprised, half-ravished sound, a sigh and gasp all at once, and reached up, steadying herself with a hand flattened against his chest.
He edged closer still, his legs entangling in her heavy skirts, but trying not to startle her. In an effort to restrain himself, he braced his forearm on the wall above her head, angling his own to better access the perfect ripeness of her lips, to flick his tongue along the sweet seam until—mercy!—her mouth opened and her tongue found his own.
He groaned, surrendering to the pleasure of her untutored exploration. For long, glorious moments he kissed her until he felt her hand creep up his chest and she linked her arms around his neck, her fingers sifting through his hair. In reply, his body turned rock-hard. Only a few inches separated her from becoming manifestly aware of his state of arousal. He wanted to kiss her, not shock her. His jaw tightening with frustration, he stepped back, releasing her mouth.
She blinked, startled by his sudden desertion. He looked away, taking a deep, steadying breath. His emotions were chaotic and unfamiliar, an uncomfortable mix of desire and the desire to protect. She shouldn’t be here with him. This was a mistake. A foolish, masochistic indulgence.
“Good heavens, you are adroit at this seduction thing, aren’t you?” she whispered breathlessly.
“You didn’t know? Of course I am. My dear, I am the Prince of Rakes.” He glanced back at her sardonically, the once amusing sobriquet coming like a curse to his lips.
Her arms slipped from around his shoulders. He looked down at her, prepared to offer an arrogant curl of the lip, but the sight of her ruined the attempt. She looked puzzled and somber, her cheeks flushed, her eyes bright and unnervingly candid.
“Of course you are,” she said. “I mean, I had heard that. You do have a far-ranging reputation. But one hears so much about so many people, and then when one meets the individual, one realizes that rumors have simply exaggerated what is, in fact, not all that extraordinary.”
He laughed, startled out of his dark mood. She confounded him, robbed him of his intent, his sangfroid, his reputation. She stripped away all his preconceptions about young ladies, leaving him without a clue to guide him. She fascinated and mystified him. What was she doing? What was she about?
“I see,” he said. “Rather a letdown, am I?”
“Oh no! Not at all. You quite exceed expectations,” she hastened to reassure him with such artlessness, such solicitous concern for his rakish reputation, that he could not help but laugh again. “I have never been kissed so . . . so convincingly.”
“Now ’tis you who are kind, Lady Cecily,” he said, though something about her use of the word “convincingly” nettled him. She thought he’d been playing a role. In truth, he had never before been so lost in a simple kiss and it annoyed him that she did not realize it.
“But then, perhaps you should ask Miss Marilla’s opinion,” she said. “She may have a different judgment.”
He started and stared, stunned she had alluded to the kiss she’d witnessed. A little ember glowed in the depths of her amber-colored eyes. Jealousy?
Then she smiled at him with such dazzling unaffectedness that his breath caught in his throat and he lifted his hand to touch her, but she’d already turned away and started down the gallery. He hastened to her side, once more offering his arm. She took it with a nonchalance that startled him, coming so close on the heels of their heated kiss. At least, he thought in growing consternation, he’d considered it heated . . .
“Truth be told,” she continued as if there had been no break in the conversation, “I don’t know many rakes.”
“I should hope not,” he said, once again caught off-balance by the turn of the conversation. She should be blushing or berating him for taking advantage of her, or perhaps enticing him to try his luck again, responses he was used to and expected. She should not be acting as if the preceding moments hadn’t happened, as if their kiss were insignificant. It was significant to him!
He’d never been in such a situation before. She had him at sixes and sevens, his assumptions challenged, his body taut with desire, his aplomb all but vanished, and his heart thundering with something that could only be described as a mad craving . . . to touch her, to kiss her.
“In fact,” she went on, “I’ve only known two bona fide rakes: you and a far-removed cousin whose exploits we only speak of sotto voce.”
“Do not tell me there is a rival for my crown?” he said, struggling to match her insouciance. “Surely his reputation does not equal mine?”
“Oh, it is far worse than yours,” she said comfortably. “I have it on good authority—those being the miscreant’s own words—that he has seduced upwards of eighty of the ton’s most well-respected ladies.”
“He told you this?” Robin asked, surprised she had been allowed to converse with a known rake, let alone that the conversation had been on such a subject.
“Yes,” she said. “Though not when anyone else was about to hear. Certainly not within earshot of my parents. Oh no,” she said, surprising him by chuckling, “they would not have been happy to hear about that conversation. Not at all.”
Nor was Robin. Acid-bright jealousy curled in his belly. Had this unknown libertine kissed her? And, afterward, had she been this cavalier?
“No,” she continued, “he waited until he had me all to himself at my parents’ country ball in Surrey last year. They were occupied with greeting their guests when Marmeduke convinced me to walk out onto the terrace with him.”
Marmeduke? She was on such intimate terms with this blackguard she called by his Christian name?
“There was no one else about and he took ruthless advantage of our unexpected privacy.” She darted a glance at him. “I suspect I should have left at once. We were absent from the ballroom for far too long. But his stories were so fascinating that I couldn’t resist staying to listen. I am sure our guests must have begun wondering what had become of us,” she finished.
He doubted this, if only for one compelling reason: had Lady Cecily disappeared onto a terrace with a known debauchee long enough to provoke questions, her reputation would never have survived. Yet, apparently, it had.
He’d made a mistake. He had misjudged her. He’d thought her awake to all suits, an uncommonly sophisticated ingénue, but she seemed as unaware of how close she had skirted disaster as a toddler hurtling by a steep flight of stairs. She was a danger to herself. Someone should have been guarding her reputation, and clearly, no one had been.
&n
bsp; Far be it from him to interfere, but he could not allow her to go careering about society with no one to guide or protect her. When her father showed up to collect her, Robin would see to it that they had a chat wherein he outlined the gentleman’s paternal duties for him.
What was he thinking? He wouldn’t be here when her father arrived. But . . . but he could go to London.
Tongues wagged quite freely in London’s less salubrious gentlemen’s clubs during the off-season, when there was little else to do but gossip. As soon as he returned to town, he would find this . . . this Marmeduke and have a conversation with him and make sure that the bastard understood the meaning of discretion. Because while Robin’s reputation for seduction might be exaggerated, his reputation as someone not to be trifled with was not.
“What is my rival’s full name, may I ask?” Somehow, he managed to sound no more than curious.
“Marmeduke, Lord Goodhue.”
He frowned. He could have sworn he knew every roué in London. “I don’t believe I’ve ever met the gentleman.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised. He rarely visits London, staying solely in Surrey,” she replied.
“He lives near your family’s country estate?” he asked. Where in Surrey? He’d always meant to visit Surrey.
“Not near our house. In our house. He became our permanent houseguest after having become insolvent a few years ago and having nowhere else to go. Indeed, my parents assigned him chambers right next to mine.”
He stared at her, an odd sensation rising within him. Damnation, he believed he was shocked. He hadn’t been shocked since he was fifteen and the Latin teacher’s wife had offered him different sorts of lessons.
“Well, we couldn’t very well put him in the servants’ hall,” she said defensively. “Though I have little doubt he’d much prefer it. The chambermaids are always threatening to give notice as it is.”
It wasn’t simply a marvel the girl’s reputation was intact; it was a bloody miracle.
“Damn, you say,” he muttered under his breath, and she burst out laughing. Her whole face bloomed with merriment, her eyes dancing, the laughter bubbling from her lips, her teeth flashing in an open grin. She took his breath away.
The Lady Most Willing Page 20