Grace thought of that awful night in London ten days ago when she had asked Dylan what he intended to do with the child.
Be a real father. What else can I do?
He had meant it. He spent whole days with Isabel now, instead of minutes. He spoke of her as something more than simply an obligation. He was becoming a real father, a father in the most important sense of the term. She smiled as she watched him lift Isabel onto his wide shoulders. He waded out in the surf up to his hips, his arms lifted with his hands on his daughter’s waist.
Days like this were what the child needed so much. Attention, care, and love. Grace wondered what would happen when the year had passed and her agreement with Dylan was over. The cottage he had promised her was somewhere here on his estate, and she would be willing to remain Isabel’s governess, but what of the child’s father? If he remained in Devonshire, could she stay?
Grace forced such speculations out of her mind. She knew they were useless. She returned her attention to father and daughter, watching as Dylan carried Isabel out of the surf.
When they returned to where she sat, Isabel dumped the contents of her pockets on the blanket to show off her treasures to Grace, but it was not long before the child’s attention was once again diverted. She started to explore the area behind them, wading into the mass of sea pinks, white stitchwort, and other May flowers that covered the hillside.
“Careful,” Dylan warned her as she bent to pick a handful of the white flowers. “If you pick that stichwort, you’ll be pixy-led.”
“What does that mean?” The child straightened and looked at him, puzzled. “What is pixy-led?”
Grace and Dylan looked at each other and laughed, but it was she who answered Isabel’s question. “To be pixy-led is to be mad, bewildered, or lost. Even bewitched.”
Dylan added in a murmur, “Or intoxicated.”
She ignored that and explained to Isabel, “The piskies don’t like it when people pick the stichwort, and they shall put a spell on you and lead you astray.”
Isabel looked at her father, eying him with doubt. “Is that true?”
“Of course,” he said, straight-faced. “Everyone knows about the pixies.”
Isabel was not convinced. She folded her arms. “Have you ever met one of these pixies, Papa?”
“Yes, I have. They are very sweet things.”
“What?” Grace protested, trying to sound as serious as possible. “Piskies are not sweet! They are devilish green creatures, and small enough to ride on snails. And,” she added to Isabel, “they don’t like children who misbehave. If you are naughty, they will come and turn your nose into a sausage.”
“I don’t believe it!” the child said stoutly. “If that was true, Papa would have a sausage nose. He always misbehaves.”
Dylan laughed, but Isabel was serious. She walked back over to the blanket and plopped down on the sand beside it. She shook her head with disapproval. “You two are not very good at making up stories,” she said, sounding wise. “When you try to fool someone, you should make sure your stories match.”
Dylan’s lips almost curved into a smile, clearly amused by his daughter’s advice. “What do you mean?”
“Mrs. Cheval calls them piskies. You said pixies. And you said they are sweet, and she said they are not. She said they are green, and you didn’t say that. You see, you are making this up as you go along.”
“No, no,” Grace assured her. “I come from Cornwall, where we call them piskies.” She glanced meaningfully at Dylan. “And they are not sweet. They are mean.”
He ignored her. “Not mean. Sweet. Pretty.”
“You two are teasing me,” Isabel said with a sniff.
“We’re not teasing,” he assured her. “Every person sees different kinds.”
She rolled her eyes. “It all sounds silly to me. I don’t believe pixies are real at all.”
Grace and Dylan looked at each other.
“Grace,” he said as if astonished, “my daughter does not believe in pixies.”
“They get very angry when little girls don’t believe in them,” she replied. “They’ll cut off all her hair when she’s asleep,” she added ominously, moving her fingers like a pair of scissors. “They might paint her face green and we’ll never be able to wash it off.”
“They wouldn’t!” Isabel cried, suspending disbelief for a moment in the face of Grace’s warning. “Would they, Papa?”
“No, no,” he reassured her. “You’re my daughter, and the pixies like me.”
Grace turned to Isabel. “The piskies may like him, but little girls are different, so you’d best be good.” Grace shot him a warning look from beneath the brim of her bonnet not to contradict her about that, and he took the hint.
“Sir?”
Dylan glanced past her, and Grace turned to see Molly standing on one of the steps carved into the side of the cliff. “It’s time for Isabel’s dinner,” the nanny told them.
The child gave a cry of dismay. “Oh, no! Do I have to go in?”
“All of this will still be here tomorrow,” Dylan reminded her. “You live here, remember? Go on.”
Reluctantly, Isabel stood up, brushing sand from her backside as she walked to where Molly stood on the stone step waiting for her. She grasped the woman’s hand but paused before starting up to the house. “Papa?” she called and turned to give Dylan a mischievous smile. “Does this mean next time I do something naughty, I can say a pixy led me to do it?”
“No!” Grace said before he could speak.
When Isabel started back toward the cliff steps with Molly and vanished from view through the thick shrubbery and trees, Grace returned her attention to Dylan. “I was trying to persuade her to be good and you ruined it!” she said in good-humored exasperation. “Nice piskies, indeed!”
“Sorry. I couldn’t bear to let her think her face could turn green.”
“Oh, heavens!” she cried, laughing. “You do have it badly!”
“What do you mean?”
“You are smitten, Dylan Moore, thoroughly smitten, with your little girl.”
“Perhaps I am,” he admitted, laughing with her and looking a bit stunned by the notion. “Who’d have thought that was possible?”
“I never doubted it for a moment,” Grace lied.
He reached behind him, plucking a handful of sea pinks and stichwort from a clump nearby. He turned toward her, rising on his knees. Before she realized what he intended to do, he lifted one of the pinks above her head and pushed it into the ribbon band of her bonnet. Grace stared into the white wall of his shirt front. His shirt was wet, and through the fine linen she could see the hard lines of his body.
“Now you’ve done it,” she said and shook her head in an attempt to deter him. “You picked that stichwort, and now you’re the one being pixy-led.”
“Too late. I became pixy-led five years ago.”
Those words startled her and she tried to look up, but he placed his hand firmly on the crown of her head. “Don’t move,” he said and pushed a white flower into the ribbon of her bonnet, then leaned back and reached for another flower from the handful he had picked. This time, instead of putting it in her hat, he brushed the pink tuft of the flower beneath her chin, with a faint, knowing hint of a smile. “Pixies are sweet,” he pronounced. “Pretty.”
Grace felt the delicate edge of a flower petal tickling her chin and shredding her notions of virtue. He brushed the flower along her jaw, up her cheek, and over her bonnet, then added it to the other one he’d already tucked into the ribbon band.
The sun was low in the west behind him, and his arms were raised, making his torso a dark shadow inside the fabric. From beneath her hat brim, Grace lifted her gaze as high as she could without moving her head, then let it fall across him again—the beard stubble beneath his chin, the strong column of his throat, the unbuttoned opening of his shirt, and the barest hint of the black chest hair beneath it. Her memory filled in the rest—a dark triangle that tapere
d down with his torso and disappeared beneath the waistband of his trousers.
She closed her eyes, and her fingers curled into the blanket on each side of her hips, digging into the sand. She was utterly still, feeling the pull of him like Newton’s gravity, trying to hold off natural laws by grasping fistfuls of sand.
He lowered his arms and bent sideways to look into her face beneath the stiff overhanging brim of her bonnet. “Nice hat,” he said and ducked his head beneath it.
If he kissed her, if he pressed her down into the sand, she would let him. In the space of a heartbeat. His every kiss eroded her resistence just a little bit more, until now it was as easy to tear apart as paper, and she knew she was the one under a spell. His spell. He wasn’t touching her, but his mouth was only an inch away and his gaze was like a caress. She felt herself teetering on the edge of a cliff. Last time she’d felt this way, she’d jumped off that cliff. She had floated and soared like a bird on the wing, only to come crashing to the ground in a painful, broken mess.
If he kissed her right now, she would take that foolish, foolish step, fall right off into space, and forget the hard, painful lessons she had learned about wildly attractive, disreputable men. If he kissed her, she would drag him off the edge with her. She would pull the long, heavy length of his body over hers, feel his weight, his mouth, his beautiful hands.
Dylan did not kiss her. Instead, he moved back, putting a bit of distance between them. “Were you really trying to use pixies to make Isabel behave?” he asked in the most ordinary, conversational voice imaginable as he sat back and stretched his long legs out beside her hip, still not touching her.
Grace fought her way back from that high, dangerous cliff to a safe, sensible place on solid ground. She forced herself to concentrate on the conversation they had been having. Parental discipline, a good subject, a safe one. “It worked when my governess did it.”
“Too well, in my opinion.”
“You just demolished my best weapon,” she told him, ignoring that comment. “The best weapon anyone in the West Country has with children. Fear of the piskies is very handy sometimes, Dylan.”
“We shall need to find other ways to keep her out of trouble.”
“It’s too late. I fear that now, any time she wants to do something, she can say she was pixy-led.”
“I cannot blame her for that.” Dylan reached for another sea pink. He stripped away the flower and tossed it aside, then stuck the stiff stem between his teeth, leaned back on his hands, and grinned at her like a Penzance pirate. “It has always worked for me.”
He was downstairs. Grace knew because the piano woke her again. This had been happening every night for a week now. She never knew when he slept, but it had to be for only a few hours at a time, for he spent much of his time during the day with Isabel and herself.
Grace had drifted off to sleep every night to the sound of his piano. In London, he went out at night, but here, she realized, there was nowhere to go. He did not seem to like the quiet and serenity of the country, but that did not make sense, for he had bought an estate in the country.
Grace listened, recognizing the part of his composition she had played the other night and the variations he had invented on that theme. There was more, pieces of music she had never heard before. She closed her eyes, and as she listened to him work, she remembered how it felt whenever he touched her, the hot, wild joy he evoked with each caress, each kiss.
She tried to talk herself into being sensible. He had gone to a courtesan. Though he was sorry Isabel had seen him there, he wasn’t at all sorry he’d gone. That should have put some sense in Grace’s head, but it didn’t.
She tried to remind herself that women were playthings to him, trifles to be enjoyed for a time, then set aside. What would it be like to be his plaything, just for a little while?
Grace groaned and pulled the sheet over her head. She wanted to be respectable and virtuous, she reminded herself, but that wasn’t any fun. She tried to remember Etienne, but he was a dim memory in her heart now, vanquished by a man to whom second place did not exist.
Dylan Moore made being a respectable widow seem as satisfying as…well…porridge. She had fought against this for weeks now, but no woman could be expected to hold out longer than that against a man like him. He was over six feet and fourteen stone of pure dessert.
But he was a man of much deeper character than that, complex, mercurial, and a better father than he had ever given himself credit for. She thought of the infinite tenderness with which he treated his child, showing a patience with Isabel that Grace would not have thought he possessed. Though he had not wanted the responsibilities of fatherhood, when they had hit him in the face, he had taken them on completely. More than that, he had come to love his daughter. And that, Grace knew, was the thing that was sending her over the edge of that cliff.
Grace was afraid of it, she had not wanted it, she had fought so hard against it, but she could not stop it. She was falling in love with him.
The music stopped. She waited, but when she heard no more music, and she did not hear him coming up the stairs to go to his bedchamber, she pushed back the counterpane, put on her dressing robe, and went downstairs.
She found him staring at the opened folio on the music stand, his arms folded. Across the closed lid of the piano were more sheets of music, along with quills, ink, and a jar of blotting powder.
“Awake again, I see,” she murmured.
He stirred and glanced at her. “I’m afraid so.”
Grace walked over to the stand beside him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Why do you not sleep well?” she asked. When he did not answer, she ventured a teasing guess. “Guilty conscience?”
That got a hint of a smile. “No.”
He did not elaborate, and Grace glanced at the sheet music in the folio. “How is the music coming?”
“Right now it is not making me happy. This third movement is supposed to be a minuet, but I keep writing it like a scherzo. It wants to be a scherzo, and I am fighting it.”
“Shall I leave you two alone?”
That made him chuckle. “No, don’t, I beg you. If you do, it will continue to torture me.” He closed the folio and looked up. “Tea in the rotunda, ma’am?” he suggested.
“No, I think—” She hesitated, then she jumped off the cliff. “I want to see my cottage.”
“What, right now?”
“Do you have something else to do?” Her voice quavered a little.
He noticed it. He turned toward her, tilting his head back, and looked at her thoughtfully. “You truly want to see it tonight?”
“Yes.” She ran her hand along his shoulder, the silk of his dressing gown slick beneath her palm. Her hand curled at the side of his neck. “I want to see it right now.”
He leaned forward and looked down at her toes, then looked up at her again and smiled a little. “You had best put shoes on. It’s about a half-mile walk.”
She went upstairs, slipped into stockings and her short black boots, then wrapped her shawl around her shoulders. When she came back down, she saw that he had put on boots as well, the stirrups of his black-and-tan striped Cossacks tucked beneath.
He took her out into the garden, where he turned down a side path. He reached back for her hand and led her down a sloping, narrow dirt path through the trees and shrubbery. When they came out of the trees, he pointed down the hill, where she saw the shadowy lines of hedgerows and silvery patches of meadow in the moonlight. Nestled amid them, she saw the line of a roof and the whitewashed stone walls of a cottage.
They walked down the hill, and as they approached the front door, she could see that it looked like thousands of others all over the West Country, with the thatched roof and fat dormers she had always envisioned, but it was different in one very important way. It was going to be hers.
“It has glass windows,” she said, and looked at him, a wave of joy bubbling up inside her. She began to laugh under her breath.
&nbs
p; “Do you like it?” he asked.
In the moonlight, the red dragons on his dressing gown were barely visible, but she knew they were there, and she thought of the stories brought to Stillmouth by the sailors who declared they had been to the edge of the earth.
Beyond this place, there be dragons.
She wasn’t afraid of dragons, not tonight. Grace knew that right now, there was nothing to either hope or fear. She had only the hungry need to be with him. She could bear another night alone, but she did not want to, and she did not have to. However many nights she had with him, she would enjoy them all. Grace had no illusions about the aftermath. She would crash somewhere, sometime, but oh, the sweetness on the way down.
“Do you like it?” he repeated.
“It is perfect.” She grabbed his hand. “Let’s go in.”
They went inside the cottage, where there was a front parlor to her right and a dining room to her left. Each room had its share of castoffs—old chairs, stacks of wooden crates filled with bric-a-brac, and a few rickety tables. Dylan went into the parlor, making his way through the maze of stuff on the floor. He walked to one of the windows that flanked the stone fireplace, and Grace followed him.
“Out there is the cottage garden,” he told her over his shoulder as he pointed out the window. “And yes,” he added, looking out, “it has roses in it.”
Grace walked over to him. She glanced past him and saw an arbor with pale, half-opened rosebuds that gleamed in the moonlight. She put her hands on his shoulders. The silk of his dressing gown was smooth and warm from his skin, the muscles beneath her hands taut and powerful. She would look at the roses tomorrow.
At her touch, he turned around, and she lifted her hand to his face. The strands of his hair tickled the back of her hand as she curved her palm across the nape of his neck. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you for this.”
She leaned closer, rising up on her toes. “I wanted to come out here for another reason,” she said and used her free hand to tug at the sash of his dressing robe.
“What reason is that?” He was rigidly still as her fingertips caressed the tight tendons at the back of his neck.
Guilty Series Page 50