by Louise Allen
Panting with fear and relief and desire, Caroline gathered up her skirts and followed across the pasture, hurrying in the wake of Gabriel’s long stride.
As they reached mid-slope Gabriel stopped, turned and looked back at the house. ‘No lights. We’re clear away for now.’
She tried not to puff. She should be flattered, she supposed, that he had assumed she could keep up, that she would not need treating as though she was some fragile little flower who required cossetting. She was going to need all the strength she had to make good her escape, however much help she had. She would not think about those kisses. Not yet.
‘Are you all right?’ He might have read her mind, or perhaps her breathing was not as controlled as she had thought. It was impossible to read his face by starlight.
‘I...I don’t know,’ she said as he caught her hand and began to stride on up the hill. Know what?
When they reached the chapel Gabriel slammed the door, caught her to him and locked his mouth on hers. When he finally lifted his head he seemed as breathless as she was. ‘Yes?’
‘Yes.’ This. Now. We’re safe, we’re alive and we did it together.
His lips captured hers again, his hands moved over her clothes, things fell away, cool air touched her skin. Bare skin. Gabriel was still fully dressed.
Caroline scrabbled between their bodies, found buttons, pulled and tugged and now he was helping her. His shirt was gone, her breasts were crushed against his bare chest and he was still except for his hands caressing down over her shoulders, his thumb tracing her spine, his breath hot on her neck.
She wriggled, not knowing what she wanted, only knowing that she needed him.
‘Shh.’ Gabriel’s voice was a breath in her ear, a shiver that followed his fingers on her backbone. He set her slightly away from him and she protested, then stilled as the space gave room for the crisp hair on his chest to tease her breasts, for him to slide one hand up between their bodies to capture a nipple between thumb and forefinger, his palm cupping the breast as he rolled the sensitive nub until she was gasping, her forehead dropped on his shoulder for support, her hands clutching at his upper arms.
He moved, pulling her with him, and she was sprawled in his lap as he sat on the edge of the bed, one hand still tormenting her breast, his mouth on the other nipple, sucking and licking as the waves of sensation rippled through her, down to her belly, down between her legs. There was pressure, a building, aching pressure down there and she arched up, needing something to ease it, to end it, to make it last for ever.
As though he understood, Gabriel’s hand slid from under her and he touched her there where she needed him. His fingers slipped into the swollen, wet, intimate folds as she bowed up to him, he bit gently on the nipple he was sucking and a shudder of some electric, terrifying sensation ran through her, then he slipped one finger, two, into her and she heard her own voice in an incoherent cry as the pleasure swept her away. Impossible to withstand, terrifying, wonderful.
He moved. She found herself alone on the narrow bed and whimpered, reaching blindly for him, for his heat, then Gabriel’s weight was over her.
‘Caroline.’
‘Yes,’ she panted. ‘Gabriel. Please.’
He kissed her again, his lips travelling softly over her jaw, down her neck...
She smiled to herself, wrapped in the warmth of the pleasure he was giving her. She ran her fingers through his hair and gasped as his tongue met her breast again.
‘Are you finally claiming my IOU?’ she murmured, trailing her fingers down the solid muscles of his back.
He stilled.
Under her splayed fingers she could feel the shift of muscle, the tension that shivered under his skin. Then he rolled off her, down the floor and sat, back to the bed, his head on his raised knees.
‘Gabriel?’
‘I am sorry, Caroline. That should not have happened.’
Not? The pleasure still rippled through her, wonderful, transforming, but something inside her shrivelled like a rosebud in the frost. ‘I want you. I am a grown woman, I can make my own decisions.’ I will not feel shame. ‘And you want me.’ Which was the truth.
He stood up. Tall, beautiful, arrogantly male, half-naked. She wanted him to come back so she could touch him, explore that loose-limbed body, but she was too proud, too hurt, to ask.
‘That was a mistake. The result of shared danger, suspense and too-close proximity.’ Gabriel scooped up his shirt from the floor and pulled it over his head, his back turned to her. ‘I have never... Damn it, I do not sleep with virgins. I should never have taken that idiotic IOU.’
He gathered up her scattered clothing, heaped it on a chair close by her, still without looking, and went to the fire.
‘I do not regard it,’ she said. She dragged on her clothes, fingers fumbling with laces and hooks.
‘You are good to forgive it. Now it is better forgotten.’
What was there to say to that? But that was the start of something wonderful? Please come back to me? Presumably he thought verbal cold water worked as well as the real thing for quenching desire.
The silence seemed to fill the room like fog. Someone had to find a way through it. Be practical.
‘Gabriel, where is there to hide here? The first thing Father is going to do is search all the buildings on the estate.’
He took a breath as though she had jerked him back from far away, but his voice was perfectly normal when he spoke. ‘When I arrived here I looked for a cache for the things I brought with me that would have revealed my identity.’ He had stopped frowning, no doubt because he could now stop thinking about what had just happened. ‘You might say I’ve discovered a priest’s hole. It is certainly large enough to hide you in.’
He bent over the hearth, raked the embers into a heap at the back and ducked under the piece of timber that had been nailed across the opening to make a shelf. ‘Come and see.’
There was just room to stand beside him on the hot stone. Gabriel took the candle, put his foot into a crack in the masonry and began to climb. She saw the light dim as he seemed to thrust the candle into the wall, then with a heave he vanished, too. ‘Can you follow me?’ His head emerged, apparently out of solid stone.
‘I’ll try.’ Caroline tucked up her skirts and got her toe into the first foothold.
It was a scramble, but with Gabriel’s strong arm to haul on she found herself level with a hole that opened into a small chamber. ‘What is this?’ It smelled, not unpleasantly, of wood smoke.
‘They built the tower as a hollow sham. Then your father wanted the place made habitable and told the builders to make a hearth. They created a shaft inside the tower with the chimney poking out below the crenulations, roofed over the top and sealed the opening at ground level. They could have filled in the tower completely, but that would have wasted stone and taken time, so they simply put in this intermediate level, I assume for support.
‘I worked out what they had done, moved a stone or two to see if there was a possible hiding place and found this space. You can’t see it from below and I doubt your father even realises it is here. I only found it because I was expecting makeshift construction—the whole place is no more than a stage set.’
Caroline looked around. There was a pair of valises stacked in the corner and when she lifted the candle she could see the roof high above her head. ‘There’s room to lie down and sleep.’
‘I’ll bring you up blankets.’
‘Not yet. We have to talk.’
‘In the morning.’ Gabriel backed out of the hole and vanished. She heard him moving around below, then he reappeared with two blankets and her valise, went down again and brought up a jug. ‘Drinking water.’
‘I am coming down for a minute.’ Caroline clambered down, which was considerably less easy than climbing up. ‘I’ll
be back shortly,’ she said as she went outside and headed for the edge of the clearing. There was a nice non-brambly clump of bushes just there, she recalled, and there were limits to how long she could be expected to sit in a tower trying not to think about running water. Although that was less uncomfortable than thinking about facing the man who had just brought her that shattering pleasure and almost relieved her of her maidenhood.
When she came back Gabriel was remaking the fire at the front edge of the hearth. ‘I’ll light it when you are up and keep it in all night, I’ve checked and the draw on the chimney is so good the smoke hardly gets into the chamber at all. When your father turns up I want the hearth to look as normal as possible.’
‘You think of everything.’ She paused beside him, laid her hand on his arm. ‘Thank you so much. No one else would help me like this.’
‘You have nothing to thank me for. I have nothing to lose by it and I was bored.’
She tried to disregard the cynicism which she suspected masked a very real anger over their almost-lovemaking. ‘But if he discovers you helped me, my father might call you out.’ Under her fingers she could feel the strength of his forearm, a swordsman’s arm.
‘And I would refuse to fight a man old enough to be my father, a perfectly honourable course.’
‘Lucas, then!’
‘I’d put him on his back with a neat rapier hole in his shoulder. Much less dangerous to his health than pistols.’
‘You are exasperatingly calm about all this.’ Caroline sat down on the simple wooden chair, her legs refusing to tolerate any more.
‘I’m sorry.’ Gabriel hitched one hip on the table and folded his arms. He had an edge to him that was new to her, the sense that he was operating at a different level of concentration and awareness than anyone else. Perhaps this was what made him the successful gambler that he was. Or perhaps that was what a frustrating, almost sexual encounter did to a man.
‘Would you rather we had high drama?’ he asked. ‘I find that sort of thing distracting. Tomorrow I will send a letter and arrange a rendezvous. The hermit will vanish and your father has no means of finding him because every step of the process in London was under false names. My eminently sensible and well-connected friends will put their heads together with us and we will decide on how you can vanish and begin a new life.’
‘I have been incredibly lucky, haven’t I? And hopelessly naive.’ The awareness swept through her along with the weariness. ‘I was so worried about Anthony’s lands that I came up with a quite shocking solution and I did not deserve your forbearance. And now you rescue me again at the risk of scandal.’
‘Scandal does not concern me.’
‘Why not?’ She was almost asleep where she sat now, drowsy with reaction and a strange mixture of tension and relief. And awareness. The room seemed to be full of man... This man who now knew her body intimately, while she knew him not at all.
‘There’s a Scottish proverb I have always held by. They say! What say they? Let them say. I concern myself with the good opinion of those I respect, everyone else can go to the devil. And you, my lady, are asleep where you sit. Bed for you.’
That seemed such a good idea. He was pulling her to her feet and his arms were around her and he smelt of warmth and yew trees, smoke and man, and something musky. Mingled, it made a very excellent scent. ‘Bottle it,’ Caroline murmured, holding on to as much of Gabriel as she could get her arms around. Yes, bed was a wonderful idea. Bed with Gabriel.
‘Asleep and dreaming,’ he murmured in her ear. ‘Come on, one foot in front of the other, and duck...and this foot up and there you go.’
A large hand was under her backside and she was heaved unceremoniously up and into the secret chamber. Her searching fingers found rough wool and Caroline had enough strength to roll on to one blanket and pull the other over her. Then she fell asleep.
Chapter Nine
Caroline woke to the scent of wood smoke mingling with coffee and bacon. A faint red glow marked the entrance to the chamber and she realised that Gabriel must have stirred up the fire and was making breakfast. She stretched, blushing as she remembered last night.
She crawled to the entrance and called down, ‘Gabriel?’ before she could think about being shy.
His voice echoed up the chimney. ‘Stay there and I’ll scout around.’
‘But I need—’
‘Stay!’
He was back within moments. ‘Someone is coming. Keep back, keep silent.’
All thoughts of coffee, of embarrassment, of a convenient bush or of warm water vanished. Caroline retreated into the corner with the valises, pulling the blankets with her, and heard what had alerted Gabriel, the hoofbeats of horses moving fast.
‘My lord?’ That was Gabriel, his voice carrying from outside. He must have left the door open.
‘My daughter. Have you seen her?’
‘Lady Caroline? Not since last night, my lord. Is something amiss?’ Gabriel had remembered his Welsh accent.
‘Of course there’s something damn well amiss, you idiot! She is missing.’ That was Woodruffe.
‘Search the place.’ Her father again. There was the sound of booted feet on the stone flags.
‘My lord, I protest!’
‘You are in my employ and this is my property. I’ll search what and where I please.’ Her father was in the room now, his angry voice carrying clearly up the chimney. Caroline froze into immobility as the scraping of furniture being dragged over the flagged floor drowned out the sound of voices.
There’s virtually nothing to search once they’ve overturned the bed. A loud thud suggested they had just done that.
‘The chimney.’
‘But the fire, my lord. It’s alight.’ That was one of the grooms.
‘Step round it and look up, you dolt. Take the lantern.’
‘I can see the sky, my lord,’ the man said after a moment. A flicker of light hit the wall opposite the opening, but from below she knew the entrance was invisible. ‘There’s no one up there, that’s for sure. And there’s no ladder or rope or anything.’
‘All right, come out, take that path there. You, go down that ride. Look for tracks.’
‘My lord, I may be in your employ, but that does not mean I have to accept accusations of assisting in—what? A kidnap? Abduction? Elopement?’ Gabriel had found just the right note of angered innocence.
‘You, and every man in this place, will accept what I say,’ her father snapped. ‘And you spent time with her. Enough time for her to wind you round her finger.’
‘And why should Lady Caroline do that, my lord?’
‘Mind your own business and keep your place, damn you.’
Her nails were digging into her palms at the threat in her father’s voice. She had seen him use his whip once on a hedger who had answered back. If he struck Gabriel she had no idea what the reaction would be. Murder, probably.
She had moved to the opening when Gabriel, sounding like an affronted Welsh solicitor’s clerk, said, ‘Then I must reconsider my employment here.’
Caroline stuffed her knuckles into her mouth to stifle the sudden urge to laugh. He was a loss to the stage, her father’s hermit.
‘Don’t be a fool. Who else will pay you for sitting on a stump writing poetry? Stay here and keep watch. If you see anything, send to the house. If you can lay hands on her, lock her in the chapel.’
There was the sound of horses moving off, of shouts becoming fainter.
‘Stay put a little longer,’ Gabriel said quietly from below. ‘I’ll climb the hill and locate them all.’
* * *
It seemed like an hour before he came back, but she supposed, counting her own pounding pulse in the darkness, that it was only a few minutes.
‘You can come down now.’ Whe
n she arrived in front of him, rumpled and dusty and sneezing from the soot, he checked from the door again. ‘You’re safe to go out for a few minutes now, I’ll heat you some water.’
When she returned Gabriel was busy at the fireside. ‘Here, have some coffee. I have seen them all at a good distance. The guests are out with your father on horseback. There were three grooms, also mounted, they’ve gone down towards the lake away from here. I could see people searching on foot, but they’re nearer the house. I think you can wash and we can safely have breakfast, then I’ll go to the village and leave a letter at the posting house.’
Caroline sat down with more of a bump than she had intended. ‘Don’t go yet.’ Her voice wavered and she took a moment to steady it. ‘The post boy doesn’t get to the inn until past ten.’
Gabriel put a mug on the table beside her and hunkered down to look into her face. ‘Are you about to cry?’ He sounded less than happy at the thought.
‘No, of course not.’ She wished she felt as confident of that as she sounded. ‘I am just rather...shaken, I suppose.’
‘Is this about last night?’ He jerked his head towards the bed. ‘Do you want to go back home?’
‘No!’
‘I wouldn’t let you if you did.’ Gabriel got to his feet with a swish of brown robes. ‘I would assume you’d lost your wits. Look, last night must have been...fraught. You are tired. You are anxious and uncertain and you have no idea what is going to happen to you. And you have lost control of the situation to me. That’s a combination calculated to make you weepy or angry or stupidly docile. Any one of those would be perfectly natural, but we have no time for any of them.’
‘I can certainly manage anger,’ she said and sat up straight to glare at him. ‘Do you talk to every lady of your acquaintance like this? That must explain your reputation as a lover.’
‘Sarcasm does not become you. And, no, I do not usually talk to a lady like that.’ Gabriel smiled. The slow, reminiscent curl of his lips made something shift inside her, distracted her for a moment, dismayed her as she recognised both desire and jealousy in the jumble of emotions. ‘I am speaking to you frankly as I would to a man because we do not have the luxury of soft words and endless discussion here.’