by Gaelen Foley
“I see. Well, if you are going to insult me, darling, in addition to breaking your oath, at least come out here and say it to my face.”
“Ha!” she retorted. “Do you think I’m fool enough to fall for that trick? I know exactly what you want of me. If I open this door, you’ll ravish me!”
“Now, look here,” he said crossly. “I have never touched a woman against her will in all my life—or is that what you’re afraid of? That it won’t be against your will? That you’ll want me?” he suggested in a silken tone through the door.
“You are shocking, sir! You must know I despise you.”
He laughed idly and let out a sigh. “Ah, well. Be that as it may, have pity on me, Alice. Come out. I’m not going to bite you. Better yet, let me in.”
“In here?” She gasped. The two of them, together, in a bedroom? How could he even suggest such a thing? What did he take her for? She did not allow her suitors even to touch her bare hands. She decided on the spot that she would not have permitted Lucien Knight to court her if he begged on his hands and knees.
“Come out to me, sweeting. I promise I’ll be good,” he cajoled her through the sturdy oaken door. She glared at it. “Walk with me on the grounds. There won’t be many days as warm and fine as this before the cold sets in. Have you looked outside? The leaves are ablaze, the grass is emerald, and the sky is as blue as your eyes. Does it not beckon to you?”
Not like your voice does, she thought with a small quiver, for his satin murmur was pure temptation.
“We are free here, Alice. Totally free.”
Free? she wondered. What is that? She fought the dangerous magic of his charm and glanced behind her at the window, then had a sudden inspiration. “Perhaps if you have a horse for me we could ride?”
“Very crafty, my dear,” he chided with a soft, rich laugh. “If I put you up on a horse, you’ll be racing back to Hampshire like a jockey in the Royal Ascot.”
The corners of her mouth strained to frown, but she could not help but smile at the image. She shook her head in dismay at her own traitorous desire, for a part of her actually wanted to be with him. She clung to her resistance. “You know,” she said in defiance, “there is something I have been meaning to tell you regarding our conversation of last night.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. We were discussing the people who care for us. Do you recall?”
“Ah, yes—or the lack thereof.”
She rested the poker, tip down, on the wooden chair, her eyes gleaming. “For your information, I have a number of beaux who are entirely smitten.”
There was a pause.
“I’m sure you do, ma chérie,” he said, his tone gone bland and superior.
She smiled heartily, glad to have made a dent in his arrogance. At last, it was her turn to taunt him! “First, there’s Roger Manners, a nephew of the duke of Rutland. He has proposed to me on three separate occasions. His excellences of character are too many to name and he has such beautiful dark eyes—they quite melt me. Then there’s Freddie Foxham, who is a tulip of fashion and terribly droll, and a very close friend of Beau Brummell—”
“Now, there’s something to brag about.”
“And Tom de Vere, who wins the brush at nearly every foxhunt he attends. My suitors have been faithful to me since the night of my debut. They are perfect gentlemen. They would never kidnap me.”
“Then they don’t want you as much as I do,” he growled hotly into the crack of the door.
Her eyes widened; her heart skipped a beat. “At least their offers have been respectable!”
“Oh? Then why haven’t you accepted any of them yet?”
As she stared at the door, trying to think of a tart rejoinder, his voice softened, beguiling her, weakening her. “I know why. Because you want more. You sense that these men fail to grasp your true worth. Any man who realized what a rare, exquisite jewel you are would not hesitate to do what I did today—aye, even to kidnap you, as you call it—if it was the only way to have you. Do not ask me to repent of it, Alice, for I never shall. Come out to me, Alice. I swear I’ll be good.”
He paused, and she eased down onto the wooden chair that she had used to block the door. She rested her elbow on the chair back and laid her cheek in her hand, gazing out the window at the picture-perfect autumn day, feeling torn. Free . . .
“You wrong yourself and me by assuming my interest in you is purely physical,” he went on. “I told you I am eager to further our acquaintance. I want to know what you think about things. What you want out of life. What you dream.” He hesitated. “Alice, I would have your trust.”
“How am I to give it, when you have so thoroughly compromised me?”
“I would not hurt you, nor allow you to be hurt because of me. I know what I’m doing.”
“You are selfish.”
“Yes, yes, that has already been established,” he said impatiently. “But if you knew me—if you gave me a chance—you might understand why I did it.”
She lowered her head, silent for a moment. “I do not want to know you,” she said quietly. Even as she uttered the words, she knew it was a lie—a cold, defensive lie.
“I see.”
She winced at the crisp, mocking hurt that came through so eloquently in his voice. The memory of his outraged face flashed through her mind from last night, when she had wiped away his kiss; she had not merely angered him, she knew, but wounded him. It seemed she had done it again. The pang of remorse she felt was vexing, but she could not bring herself to say she had not meant it.
Truly, what was she doing, hiding in here? she thought, pressing her hand wearily to her forehead. Nothing was going to be solved by cowardice. She was not being fair to him—she was not even being entirely truthful. There were butterflies in her stomach, but they were not born entirely of anger and mistrust, as they should have been. She cursed herself for it, but a small, traitorous portion of her thrilled to the prospect of sparring with him again. She doubted she could match him in strategy, but she was his equal in pride—and in loneliness.
She rose from the chair and began pacing, wringing her hands in distress. Had she brought this on herself, encouraged him somehow? she wondered. She had certainly succumbed last night to his kiss.
“Alice?”
She spun toward the door, her skirts whirling softly. “Yes?” she forced out.
“Do you know what I am holding in my hand?”
“No.”
“Care to guess?”
“A pitchfork?” she asked in a stilted attempt at levity, hoping to invoke his earlier, playful mood.
“No, my dear,” he answered drily. “A key to your room.”
“What?” she breathed, aghast.
“I should hate to have to use it.”
“You have a key to this room?”
“Mm-hmm.”
She took a step toward the door, panic rising up in her throat. “You’re bluffing!”
“Do you wish me to prove it?”
“No!” Heaven help her. Her back was to the wall. She would have to do as he said—but he had sworn that he would not lay a hand on her. Though she did not trust him for an instant, she had no choice but to take the blackguard at his word. The only way to keep her dignity intact was to come out willingly and face him, eye to eye. Her whole body tingled with wayward, hostile excitement as she slid the chair aside, stepped up to the door, and laid hold of the latch.
Resolute as she was on concealing her fear of him, she was even more determined to hide her intense physical attraction to him. She refused to give him the satisfaction. Gathering all her bravado, she threw open the door and glared at him.
Leaning against the wall by her door, he gave her a charming smile. “There she is, my fair, young guest. Mind you wear your mantle, dear. The weather in these parts is changeable.”
“You want to go for a walk?” she demanded, her eyes narrowing to angry slits. “Let’s walk—by all means! Anything you desire, my lord. You’ve on
ly got a few days. I suggest you enjoy them, because when they are over, you will never see me again.” She shoved the great, muscled hulk out of her path and stalked past him down the dim hallway.
“Anything I want, truly?” he called after her in a roguish tone.
She rolled her eyes and kept going.
When he caught up to her a moment later, he was carrying her fur-trimmed pelisse. She stopped long enough to let him hold it for her while she slipped her arms into the sleeves, and though she continued to glower at him, he merely gave her a knowing little smile and said nothing.
Lucien had not owned Revell Court long enough to have undertaken the task of reclaiming the gardens from nature, let alone keeping the surrounding woods properly groomed and tended. It had been enough of a task to bring the stables back into working order. Both the gardens and the woods had run wild for the past two or three years, their upkeep falling by the wayside as the marquess of Carnarthen’s health had slowly crumbled, for he had run the estate himself, not trusting an estate manager with so peculiar a property.
They crossed the terrace where weeds, ivy, and goldenrod had run amuck in the flowerbeds that lined the weather-beaten stone balustrade. Mounds of blue hydrangeas nearly as tall as Lucien crowded the three mossy steps that led down into the formal garden. He went down them, and Alice followed him toward the circular fountain. As they approached, two doves that had perched on the stately stone fountain urn fluttered away, cooing. Alice stopped beside the fountain pool and gazed down with a faraway expression at the lily pads, driven with dreamlike slowness over the surface of the shallow water like tiny sailing vessels. She studied the scene as though memorizing it, while Lucien gazed at her, watching the wind toy with her clothes and the tendrils of her hair that it had worked free from her neat coif.
Her waving red-gold hair, blue eyes, and ivory skin, and the chaste, faraway serenity of her face, put him in mind of Botticelli’s Venus, rising from the sea upon her scallop shell.
“Shall we?” he murmured.
She turned absently from her contemplative study of the lily pads. “Your garden is beautiful.”
He shrugged and glanced around at it. “It is overgrown.”
“Yes, but it has a lost, eerie beauty that quite pleases me. I wish I had my watercolor set.”
Lucien lifted his eyebrows. “Ah, are you an artistic young lady, Miss Montague?”
She smiled reluctantly. “I have been known to dabble.”
He laughed softly, tickled by the revelation. An artist. Of course. Those beautiful hands. That penetrating gaze. The seething passion under her cool, demure surface. “What sort of work do you most enjoy?” he asked as they sauntered past rows of once-conical yews that had grown into huge, dark green lumps.
“Sketching faces.”
“Really?”
“Portraits in charcoal are my forte, but I love watercolors and all sorts of crafts. Japanning, fancy embroidery.”
He turned to her suddenly. “Do you enjoy landscapes? There is a spectacular view of the valley that will delight your artist’s eye, but it is a bit of a walk—about a mile and a half each way. Do you feel up to it?”
She nodded with interest. “I am accustomed to taking a daily constitutional.”
“Good! Come, then. I’ll show you the way.” Trying to restrain his enthusiasm, he led her toward the opening in the overgrown boxwood hedge where a pair of musk rose bushes formed a thorny turnstile, marking the exit from the garden to the fallow fields and woods beyond. They stopped to take deep, lung-filling inhalations of the musk roses’ delicious, honeylike perfume. Exclaiming with unaffected joy at the roses’ late-blooming beauty, Alice cupped one of the creamy white blossoms gracefully in her gloved hand. He picked one, pulled off the thorns, and offered it to her. She took it in silence, searching his face warily, then turned away and walked on. Lucien just stood there watching her, praying he wouldn’t do anything wrong.
They ambled across the meadow and watched the breeze ripple through the high, golden grasses, serenaded all the while by larks and pipits on the wing; then they followed the twisting footpath into the whispering woods. Birds swooped from branch to branch, following them. Wind-eddied leaves flew before him like the little whirling frisson of delight he felt watching Alice negotiate her way over a stream, daintily stepping from rock to mossy rock.
As they trekked through the woods, the minutes fell away in inexorable succession like toppling dominoes, and time began to skate. Its acceleration dizzied him like the smoky, metamorphosing clouds, ceaselessly shifting as they chased across the late afternoon sky, but slowly, slowly, she began warming up to him.
She smiled at him more frequently as they chatted about nothing in particular, pointing out various flowers and the occasional woodland animal to each other. They saw plump squirrels in the trees, pheasants in the brush, and a horned stag and his shy, delicate does gliding soundlessly through the shadows.
On three separate occasions, he caught her gazing at him longer than she should. He felt distracted, entranced, and painfully alive as he watched her in the mellow autumn afternoon, dazzled by the coppery richness of her golden hair. Her innocence captivated him, and her guileless simplicity healed him somehow. He felt like a man whose fever had broken, flush with the euphoria of the first, tenuous return of strength—still weak, but buoyant with the hope of an eventual return to wholeness. The sickness in his soul, however, laid a jealous claim on him. Just as often and as quickly, the cold, dense cloud shadows would come, flying wraith-like overhead, molding the landscape and casting Alice in a gray half-light so that he wanted to draw her up close in his arms, shelter her until they passed—but he did not. It was too soon. She would pull back. He knew full well that he had only succeeded in luring her out of her room by resorting to the threat of unlocking her door himself. He could not risk scaring her away again.
All the while, the sun rolled west like a miser’s dropped coin. The day was dying; the year, as well. The smell of fallen leaves reminded him of this fact, wafting gently from under his every step as he followed Alice up the steep, twisting forest path. Determined to make her trust him, he hid his impatience behind an amiable smile as she glanced over her shoulder at him.
“Are you coming, lazy?” she asked pertly, her cheeks rosy from the brisk cold and the climb.
“Lazy?” he retorted.
“Well, what are you doing back there?” she asked. “Counting the rocks beneath your feet?” Turning away again to continue her climb, she lifted the hem of her skirts, unconsciously affording him a glimpse of her pretty calves.
“Merely enjoying the view,” he said, savoring the maidenly sway of her hips. But when his perusal led to dangerously tempting thoughts, he brushed past her and took the lead in determination, his black wool greatcoat swinging with his strides. “You’d best keep up, boots. If you fall behind, you’ll lose your rations.”
“Boots?”
“Army slang for a fresh recruit. Hurry, we’re almost there. We’ll be just in time to watch the sunset.”
“You were in the army?” she exclaimed, hurrying after him.
“Five years.”
“You’re jesting!”
“No,” he said with a sigh. “Would that I were.”
“You, in the army!” She laughed. “I find that hard to imagine.”
“So do I.”
“You don’t strike me as the sort to follow orders. What was your regiment?”
“The Hundred and Thirty-sixth Foot.”
“Oh,” she said with a dubious glance.
“I know—not a very fashionable regiment.” He gave her his hand and pulled her up over a tree root that formed a steep step in the path. “We were going to join the Blues, but Damien actually wanted to fight in the war rather than lounge around London in a smart uniform, which, I assure you, would have been perfectly acceptable to me.”
“You and he joined the army together?”
He nodded. “We saw our first action in
Denmark under Cathcart, then went to the Peninsula.”
She laughed as though she could not believe it. “What rank did you attain?”
“Captain.”
“Captain Lord Lucien!” she echoed, laughing harder. “Did you buy it or earn it?”
Taken aback, he laughed in mingled surprise and indignation. “What impertinence! Earned it, I assure you. For your information, Damien and I captained our regiment’s elite flank companies. I was—”
“No, don’t tell me! Let me guess.” Eyeing him in amusement, she tapped her lip in thought. “You’re no grenadier. Grenadiers are big, stalwart souls, the first into battle, or so I’ve been told.”
He raised his eyebrow at her, unsure if he was being insulted.
“No,” she concluded, “you must have been captain of the light infantry company. The quick-witted ones, the sharpshooters.”
“How ever did you guess?”
“I know these things,” she said with a sage look, then turned away and walked on, entirely pleased with herself.
Lucien gazed after her with a smile on his face. God help him, he was utterly charmed. “How do you know about the workings of a regiment?”
“From my brother, of course. He was in the Forty-third,” she added proudly.
“The Glorious Forty-third,” Lucien admitted, impressed. “I heard about Lord Glenwood’s gallantry at Vittoria. He was a brave man and a distinguished officer.”
“And a good brother,” she added more softly. “Were you at Vittoria, Lucien?”
“No, I left the previous year, after Badajoz.”
“Badajoz,” she murmured, her expression turning grave. “Phillip said it was the most dreadful battle of the war.”
Lucien was not sure how much her brother had told her. When she laid her hand gently on his arm a moment later, he looked down at it in silence, realizing it was the first time she had touched him of her own accord.
“Captain Lucien, you look so grim suddenly,” she murmured. “Was the battle very difficult for you?”
“It was difficult for everyone,” he countered with a shrug and looked away, irritated with his own habitual evasiveness. He stared into the shadowy woods, routing from his mind the memory of billowing black smoke that parted just long enough to reveal a glimpse of well over a thousand scarlet-uniformed bodies piled against the sun-baked walls of the old Spanish citadel. The British army had battered the French-sympathizing town into submission. “It was not so much the siege itself, but . . . afterwards,” he forced out. He looked at her, searching her face. “Did your brother tell you anything about it?”