by Louise Allen
‘What do you mean, preferences?’
He shook his head.
‘Tell me! Preserving my innocence until I am actually married to the man is not going to help.’
‘Some men enjoy pain as part of sex. Some want to receive it, be beaten.’ His face tightened as though at some unpleasant memory. ‘Others enjoy inflicting it. Woodruffe has a reputation for the latter.’
‘Oh.’ She felt sick as she recalled Miranda, Woodruffe’s first wife. The bruises because she was so careless. The days when she did not leave her room because her health was fragile. Bullying her into riding despite her fear of horses had been the least of it.
But what could she do? ‘Lord Edenbridge, listen to me. Your friend who is contemplating an unsuitable marriage is, I assume, male. He can choose. He is independent, free. I cannot choose and I am not free. Not legally, not financially and not emotionally. I have a family and I promised Mama I would somehow look after them.’ My brothers at least. Heavens knows if anything can be done for Papa. She found she was on her feet. ‘I will send back the deeds and I am truly grateful for your help. Please will you open the door now?’
‘Caroline, this is the year 1820. Your father cannot force you to the altar.’ Gabriel stood, unlocked the door, but kept his hand on the handle.
‘Not physically, no,’ she agreed, even as she wondered what bullying and bread and water might reduce her to if she defied Papa. Somehow she was going to have to persuade him because the alternatives, marriage to Woodruffe or fleeing her home and leaving Anthony, were too horrible to contemplate.
She reached the door handle and he caught her fingers in his, pulled her close until her skirts brushed his legs and she could smell him—clean, warm man, starched linen, brandy, a careless splash of some citrus scent, that hint of musk again.
‘Infuriating, stubborn woman. I do not know whether to shake you or kiss you,’ he said, his tone suggesting that neither was very desirable.
‘Kiss me then, for courage,’ she said, seized with recklessness and something that must be desire: a hot, shaky feeling, a low, intimate ache, a light-headed urge to toss common sense out of the window. No other attractive man was ever going to kiss her, it seemed. She must seize the opportunity while she had it.
Gabriel lifted one hand, cupped her jaw, stroked his thumb across her lips and the breath was sucked out of her lungs. ‘Have you ever been kissed before?’
She shook her head and he bent to touch his lips to hers, caught her around the waist with his free hand and pulled her, unresisting, against him. His mouth was warm, mobile, firm. He pressed a little, shifted position, his hand came up from her cheek to cradle her head and he made a sound of satisfaction when he had her as he wanted. Then she felt his tongue and the heat of his open mouth and opened her own in response as he slid in, exploring and stroking.
It was incredible and strange. It should be disgusting and wet, but she found the taste of him exciting, the heat inflammatory. She sensed his restraint, that he was holding back, toying gently with her, and she stepped forward until their bodies were tight together, wanting more of this strange new intimacy.
His body was hard against her curves and there was the urge to rub against him, as a cat might burrow into a caress. But he was still and perhaps he would not like it if she did that...
Far too soon Gabriel ended the kiss, took his hands from her body, stepped back. ‘Enough. Enough for your safety and more than enough for my comfort,’ he added mysteriously, as he pulled open the door and looked out. ‘Quickly, while there is no one about. Turn down Woodruffe, Caroline. Send me those deeds, then stay away from me.’ He almost pushed her out into the corridor. ‘Now go while I can still listen to what passes as my conscience.’
Gabriel had kissed her and now he did not want her. Of course not, no doubt I was clumsy in my inexperience. So what was that caress for if he did not desire her? There was something that had driven him to kiss her, something that had made that relaxed body tense. I want him, perhaps he could come to want me? Madness.
‘Well, if you do not want me I shall not burden you any longer, Lord Edenbridge.’ She made to sweep past him, annoyed that he could make her feel so much and yet obviously feel nothing himself.
There was a flurry of skirts, the muffled sound of a collision and a feminine voice said, ‘I do beg your pardon, sir.’
Gabriel half-turned to confront the speaker and Caroline caught a glimpse of a tall young lady dressed in an exquisite sea-foam-green gown.
‘Oh. Lord Edenbridge.’ The stranger did not seem overjoyed to see him and he did not even respond to her.
Caroline stepped away, her hand to her mouth, not certain whether she was stifling a sob or trying to hide her face.
‘Come back!’
She stopped, looked back.
‘Don’t be a fool,’ Gabriel said. ‘You do not have to marry him and you do not have to... Damn it, I’ve burned the thing.’
He had only been teasing her then, demanding that IOU that day at his home. She had gone through a maelstrom of emotions, through shame and fear and excitement and triumph that she had somehow rescued Springbourne for Anthony in return for that pledge, and all the time Edenbridge had never intended to take her up on it.
‘A promise is a promise,’ she said, chin up. ‘But if you do not want me—’ She shrugged, turned and walked away, gathering the rags of her dignity around her.
* * *
Gabriel swore silently, then turned to confront the other female bedevilling his life, the widowed Mrs Tamsyn Perowne, who was tying his friend Cris de Feaux, Marquess of Avenmore, in knots.
‘What in Hades are you doing here?’ he demanded ‘Does Cris know?’
‘Certainly not. I do not need Lord Avenmore’s permission to visit a relative.’ The wretched female looked down her sun-browned nose at him.
‘Come with me.’ He took her arm and swept her back into the main reception room. There, thank goodness, were Alex, Viscount Weybourn, and his wife, Tess. They could help him deal with Mrs Perowne.
Goodness knew who or what was going to help him with Lady Caroline because that clumsy kiss had made him realise that he could not cynically despoil an innocent, nor was it fair to tease her. And yet she had somehow got under his skin. Damn it, she is not my responsibility. Knighton could never force her to marry Woodruffe if she refused. Could he?
* * *
The deeds came back to him three days later with a brief, rather hurried-looking note.
I am about to leave for the country. I doubt very much if I will be able to receive or send any correspondence from there as I have grievously annoyed my father, but I know I can rely on you to look after my brother’s interests in the estate.
Thank you, you cannot know how much it means to me to have Anthony’s future safeguarded.
So Caroline had refused Lord Woodruffe. That could be the only explanation for her ‘grievously’ annoying Knighton. Good for you, my girl, Gabriel thought. He pulled paper and pen towards him and began to draft instructions for his man of business and solicitor to set in motion all the things that must be done to manage the estate and preserve the income for the young man.
None of it was very taxing, it merely required logical thought and meticulous attention to detail. His solicitor might well advise setting up a trust to safeguard both parties, but that was straightforward enough. Yet there was something niggling at the back of his mind, some sense that everything was not as it should be. Whatever it was, it was more than the memory of that innocent first kiss he had claimed, which was now wreaking havoc with his sleep. He reached for the brandy.
* * *
He had still been brooding when he fell asleep that night and he woke with a crashing headache and a feeling of unease. Corbridge, his much-tried valet, came in on silent feet and left a glass with somethin
g sinister and brown beside the bed, then wisely left without speaking.
Gabriel hauled himself up in bed, swigged back the potion without letting himself smell it, fought with his stomach for a moment, then lay back with a groan. His life was changing. Two of his closest friends were married now, Cris soon would be. Where there had been four, now there would be seven. He liked Tess and Kate. He would probably like Tamsyn when he got to know her. But the change to that close foursome only made his dissatisfaction with life worse.
He had been aware of being unsettled for months. He was bored with his life, no longer content with an existence in which winning was all that counted. Jaded, that was the word. He had a title, lands, money far beyond his needs or wants. What was he doing it for? Damn it, he had toyed with the idea of ruining a respectable young lady just for the novelty. He didn’t much like the man who could do that. Perhaps it was time to change. But if he didn’t spend his time gambling, socialising, drinking, what was the point to his life?
His three friends had been closer than his family, closer than he had ever dared allow his brothers to be. Cris, Alex and Grant had come into his life when he had been at his most desperate and vulnerable, at a time when they all needed the help that only others who had been wounded could understand. They knew his secrets, all but one of them—he could not burden them with the lies he had told the day his father died. That burden was his to carry, ever since he had made a promise to his mother, a woman so desperately unhappy she had taken her own life.
If he loved anyone, it was his friends and he knew they returned the sentiment, even if they would have died rather than admit it. From the hell that had been his childhood he had met them and learned that friendship gave what family never could, an equal give and take.
‘Good morning, my lord.’ Corbridge came in with hot water. Obviously he judged Gabriel to be back amongst the living,
‘Is it?’ Gabriel got out of bed and strode, naked, into the dressing room. ‘What’s the point of it all, Corbridge? Life, I mean, because I’m beginning to wonder.’
‘My lord...is anything amiss?’
Gabriel was aware of the valet laying one hand protectively over the razors and, despite himself, grinned. ‘It is all right, I’m not about to cut my throat, blow my brains out or otherwise put a period to my existence. I am simply wondering what I am doing with my life.’
‘My lord, you are an earl,’ Corbridge said repressively.
‘That is a title, not a job description.’ Although perhaps it was.
Manage the estates, look after the dependents, take my seat in the House, marry well, have heirs, teach the next generation to do it all over again... Focus on the title and not myself. Give up taking lovers? Step back and pray I can manage not to make a disaster of heading a family? But who would listen to my prayers?
He grimaced at his reflection and reached for the soap and sponge. He did everything he needed to do to keep the wheels of the earldom turning, but he did it at a mental distance that felt as though he had preserved it in ice. When the frost melted would he find something fresh and new to engage with or find only the rotted carcase of the past?
A disgusting image. He shook off the ghoulish thought with an effort. ‘I’m getting old, Corbridge.’ Is that why it was so hard to accept how his life was changing?
‘My lord, you are not even in your prime yet, if I may be so bold.’ The valet began to work up a lather with the shaving soap.
Gabriel grunted and scrubbed his toothbrush into the powder. What he needed was a purpose and he supposed the obvious one was his earldom and, heaven help him, his brothers, although they would probably think he’d got a brain fever if he suddenly turned up showing a keen interest in their lives and welfare. It would certainly unnerve them thoroughly.
‘I’m at home until this afternoon, then I’ll be riding. I may as well put on buckskins and boots now.’ There was business to finish, then he’d blow away the cobwebs with a good gallop and try to work out how to finally come to grips with his inheritance, all of it, on his own terms. His identity had been that of the care-for-nothing rakehell for so long that he wasn’t certain he knew who the man underneath that mask was.
* * *
It was not until the evening that he sat down and began to sort through the jottings he had made on young Mr Holm’s inheritance. He picked up Caroline’s message again, feeling the same prickle of unease as he had experienced the day before. Something was not right with it. He rummaged in the papers until he found her first note and laid them side by side. Same paper, same ink, but while the first was neat and elegantly written, the writing in the second was uneven, straggling, untidy. It looked as though it had been produced in haste and by someone who was either not themselves or who found it difficult to hold the pen. One corner of the page was distorted and he picked it up to study it more closely. A water splash. Or one fallen tear...
I have grievously annoyed my father. Father, not Papa as she had always referred to him before. Something was wrong, very wrong. He had encouraged her to defy Knighton over the marriage and now she was exiled to the country, perhaps mistreated in some way, until she gave in. In his mind he heard the crack of the riding whip, felt the shock of the pain. He had withstood it, pride and sheer bloody-mindedness had seen to that. But a woman...
Surely Knighton wouldn’t beat his daughter? Yet he wanted her to marry Woodruffe. Surely he realised what the man was? Or perhaps he really was so obsessional that he could ignore the man’s reputation?
Just because his own father had been utterly ruthless in imposing his will did not mean that Caroline’s father was. Gabriel pushed away the old nightmares, studied the slip of paper for a long moment, then folded it and put it in his breast pocket. He was imagining things were worse than they were, surely. Even so, he could not rest easy. The paperwork for her brother’s estate was soon completed and he bundled it up to go to his lawyer, then got to his feet. He had a commitment to help Cris and that might take a day or so, but then he was going to find Lady Caroline Holm and undo whatever damage he had caused.
He imagined his friends’ expressions if they knew he was contemplating involving himself in some chit’s family dramas. But Caroline was not some chit, she was intelligent, courageous and determined, and he felt guilty about the way he had teased her, he realised. That was novel enough to provoke him into action. What that action might be he had no idea, but at least he was not feeling jaded any longer.
Chapter Four
Hertfordshire—August 1st
August was usually a month Caroline enjoyed, especially if she was in the country. Now Knighton Park was a hot, stuffy prison and the sunlit gardens and park outside were a bright, tantalising reminder of just how trapped she was.
It was not my fault, she told herself for perhaps the hundredth time. It was not her lack of duty, not her wilfulness, not her foolish whims—all the faults her father had thrown at her. It is his. His tyranny, his temper. His lack of love.
It had started mildly enough. Her father announced that they were moving to Knighton Park and, recklessly, she had chosen to make a stand, to announce that she would not marry Woodruffe, or any of the middle-aged suitors he had considered for her.
The bruises on her right cheek had finally vanished. She studied her reflection in the mirror and clenched her teeth. There was some soreness and a molar was still rather loose, but she thought if she was careful it would grow firm again. The marks on her arms had almost faded, too. She could write long letters to Anthony without discomfort. His future, at least, was safe now.
The image of her face faded and the scene she kept trying to forget swam up in its place.
‘You will do as you are told, you stupid girl!’
‘I am not stupid. I am not a girl. I am of age and I will not be bartered to some man for whom I have nothing but contempt for the sake of your obses
sions.’ Caroline had no idea what kept her voice so steady, what kept her standing there as his face darkened with rage.
Her father was a believer in corporal punishment for his children, although Lucas, the favoured elder son, always seemed to escape with only the lightest of canings. As a girl, her governess had been instructed to strike her once or twice on the palm with a ruler for laziness or inattention, or whenever her father deemed her deserving of punishment, which was often. But she had never been hit by him.
Her father had grabbed her arm, held her as she’d pulled back against his grip, her righteous defiance turned in a second to stomach-churning nausea.
‘You will obey me.’ He’d jerked again as she fought against the pain in her arm. It felt as though the bones were grinding together.
‘No,’ she’d managed. ‘Woodruffe is—’ But she didn’t have the words for what Gabriel had told her. And then her father had hit her across the face, backhanded, knocking her to the ground to land in a painful sprawl against a wooden chair. She had no clear memory of being taken upstairs, only of coming to herself to find her maid bathing her face. There was a bandage on her arm.
Now, with the bruises gone, she had permission to leave her rooms, go downstairs, allow herself to be seen, provided she maintained the fiction of a virulent sore throat that had laid her up for almost two weeks. She sat down in the window seat and searched for some courage. There were tales of how prisoners were afraid to leave their cells and the security of a familiar confined space and now she could understand how they felt. But she was desperate to get out, away from the tedium and anxiety, away from the circling thoughts and desires for Gabriel Stone.
She should be ashamed of herself for having carnal thoughts about a man, because that was what they were. She couldn’t deceive herself that these were romantic daydreams about love and marriage and family. This man was never going to be domesticated and when she imagined herself with him what she saw was a tangle of naked limbs, what she felt was the heat of his body and the pressure of his lips. Beyond that she was too inexperienced to imagine detail. All she knew was that this was shocking, sinful and impossible, because when she had offered herself to him on a plate even this hardened rake had not wanted her.