by Bee Ridgway
Julia frowned up into the oak leaves above her head, tears pressing against her eyes. Otherwise she would have to leave Castle Dar, leave Stoke Canon, and go . . . where? To Scotland, to her mother’s family? She didn’t even know how to find them.
But leave she must, unless something miraculous were to happen, and soon. That had been patently obvious yesterday when she had ridden through Stoke Canon, hoping to stop and talk to people, hoping to let them know that she was still Julia Percy.
Instead, she had received only a few distant hellos, and no offers of conversation. She had kept her pride down the length of the High Street, greeting averted faces as if they were the smiling neighbors she had known all her life. But the minute she was out in the fields again she had set Marigold’s face for home and let her gallop all the way.
Once back in Castle Dar, Julia had packed two bandboxes with a change of clothes and her jewelry, then unpacked them again; the servants would discover what she was planning if she left luggage sitting about. Meanwhile, let the townspeople indulge themselves in an orgy of recriminations, old and new. “‘And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet!’” Julia spoke the words into the mirror. The sentence began bravely enough, but by the end she was weeping. How could she shake the dust of this house from her feet when she felt that she was crumbling away to join it? She knew no dust in the world but this dust.
So this morning she was riding, not away, but around, trying to collect her thoughts and make a plan.
The horse up ahead whinnied again, and Julia gave Marigold her head. She held her own head high and her spine straight. Whoever it was that waited there, Julia Percy was ready.
He was standing in the same place, the same big bay stallion beside him. His hair, which had been fair, was several shades darker. She would never describe him as all elbows now. He was taller by a head and broader in the beam. Instead of crying he was leaning at his ease against a tree. He had a lazy, distant look in his eye and he was almost, but not quite, smiling.
She had the distinct impression that he was waiting for her. She didn’t think she liked it.
So she reined Marigold in, stared right back at him, and asked the bluntest question she could think of. “Are you not dead?”
She had the satisfaction of knocking that knowing look from his face. His eyes flew wide.
Then she saw him recognize her, and it was her turn to be disconcerted. It was the strangest thing. He recognized her, and his whole face, even his body, transformed. His mouth lost its smile, but the skin around his eyes crinkled, and his eyes themselves lost that weary, faraway look. “Julia,” he said.
His voice was different. Deeper, a man’s voice. His accent was strange, too. Flattened here and there. Like the accent of someone who has returned home after years abroad. Which was, after all, nothing but the truth. He had gone to Spain. But had he returned from Spain, or the land of the dead? They had mourned him for dead. Now here he stood, fully alive, his recognition of her making his eyes change from rainy blue-gray to a warmer, darker, more disturbing color. A feeling rather than a color. Her horse shifted beneath her. She was holding the reins too tightly as she looked down at the miraculously returned Lord Blackdown. She forced herself to relax. “My lord,” she said, inclining her head. “Welcome home.”
* * *
It was Julia Percy. Nick didn’t recognize her for a moment, but then there she was. His heart began pounding. The girl who had seen him through so much. He took a step forward, his mouth opening to say God knows what, when she spoke.
“Are you not dead?”
He was stunned for a second, simply by seeing her, and by the shock of her question. Impossible to explain that he was returned from an unimaginable future. So he said her name. “Julia.” It felt wonderful, speaking it out loud after so many years, the way the tip of his tongue only lightly touched his palate, once, in the middle of the word.
He stepped forward and held both hands up to help her dismount. She put her gloved hands in his and leapt down lightly. She stood just to his shoulder, her hair the color of walnut liqueur.
“You are grown,” he said, ridiculously.
“And you have come back from the dead. I believe you have more to explain than I.”
“You’re right,” he said. “It is a tale. But first please allow me to offer you condolences on the death of your grandfather. He was a good man.”
“Thank you, my lord. It is a great loss. He mourned your death, you know. We all did.”
Nick twisted his ring on his finger. “It is rather awkward, to have been mourned, and then to return. Not that I complain. There is a comfort in knowing that people mourned you. But the monument in the churchyard—” He stopped. He was blathering.
Silence fell, except that the birds were deafening and each shifting move the horses made pointed out that he had no idea what to say to her. What was considered polite conversation between a young woman and a man? His mind was blank. “Boatswain’s still alive, too,” he said, and then wished he could swallow his tongue.
“So I see.” She turned to her black mare. “This is Marigold.”
He reached out his hand, and the mare nuzzled his fingers. “She’s beautiful.”
The animal snorted and stomped her hoof, tossing her head in Boatswain’s direction.
“She is an incorrigible flirt,” Julia said.
“I fear Boatswain is not very chivalrous.” Nick felt ashamed for his horse. The old stallion was quietly munching the long grass, twitching his ears at Marigold, but showing no interest.
Marigold put her nose in the air, whickered, and pawed the ground.
“Enough,” Julia told her, and reached into her pocket for a carrot. “He doesn’t like you. Sometimes we must face life’s disappointments head-on.”
“Shall we ride together a while, Miss Percy?” Nick found himself reaching out and taking her gloved hand again. He hadn’t encountered that frustrating but entirely thrilling sensation of holding a woman’s hand through a layer of thin leather in so long, he had forgotten entirely about it. It really was scandalously erotic, the way you could feel the heat of a woman’s hand through her glove.
“I shall be missed at home.” Julia glanced down at their joined hands. “My cousin, the new earl . . .”
Her cousin. Julia was still living at Castle Dar.
Nick went cold.
So Julia was the mistress. She was the woman the villagers had been talking about. They all thought she was sleeping with her cousin.
Julia searched his face and understood. “Ah, I see you’ve heard the gossip.” She drew her hand away and took a step back.
“I have and I don’t believe it. No one who knows you would believe it.”
She put her chin up. “You know me not at all. And those who are gossiping have known me my entire life.”
But she had been with him all along, all through the years. “We . . . we were children together!”
“Hardly, my lord. You avoided Bella and me like the pox.”
“Be that as it may, I believe I know you, and I know you are not his mistress.”
“No. I am not.” She looked him in the eye.
She reminded him of modern women. The way she stood so confidently, the way she met his eye like an equal, the way she spoke unblushingly of the sex she was not having with her cousin. But her situation was clearly taking a toll on her courage. He could tell by the way she clenched and unclenched her left fist.
Nick glanced up for a moment into the trees, wondering what to say next. He savored the cold air in his lungs. Then he looked down again at the woman standing before him. She was proud. And she was quietly desperate.
Last time they had met here, they had both been children. He had been the desperate one that day, the younger one, despite their ages, and somehow she had calmed him, soothed him. He had then carried her with him through the years as a misty memory.
&nbs
p; Now her eyes were deep, storm-tossed. She needed him.
He bowed. “I am at your service,” he said. “Tell me how to help you.”
A smile broke across her face, and Nick realized that until this moment he had been seeing a pale shadow of Julia Percy, dimmed by her own defensive courage. Glad color rushed to her cheeks and she burst into speech. “Thank you, my lord. It has been the worst of times . . .”
Her voice washed over him. He was here again, where he never thought to be, and Julia Percy was alive. She was struggling against the ridiculous strictures of her age, but it was her. Nick watched her face as she spoke: her dark hair and eyes, her vivid face. . . .
God! The river was dragging at him full force, and he had to fight his way back. She was still speaking, and he held on to her voice until it broke through and made sense.
“. . . but Eamon is difficult. He does not allow me to go abroad into society, and I have not been able to convince him that I need a chaperone to maintain my reputation.”
“I don’t understand; he doesn’t let you out? Is he mad?”
“I believe he is.”
“Why has Clare not asked you to stay at Blackdown?”
“Clare is at Blackdown!” She frowned. “I thought her gone to London with Bella and your mother.”
“She helped them settle in London but she prefers the country. She has been at Blackdown since just after your grandfather’s death. I am shocked to learn that she has not contacted you.”
That open face shut its doors again—slammed them, rather. “Oh.” She put her hand on her horse’s pommel. “She has heard the gossip. She believes it.”
“No. I am sure she has not, would not.” Nick put his hand over hers. “Do not go riding off just yet, Julia.”
She whispered, and he knew it was because if she spoke any more loudly she would either shout or cry. “Of course she believes it, Nick—my lord. I rode into the village yesterday. I saw their faces. What they believe of me, of my mother—”
“They!” Nick scoffed. “Give Stoke Canon a man, a woman, and a slightly irregular situation, and it will serve you a steaming bowl of scandal broth before an hour has passed. They will sing a different tune once you are at Blackdown. As for Clare, she is not such a ninnyhammer, but if she is, then she must simply change her mind. In any case, I am taking you back to Blackdown right now. I will not have you return to Castle Dar.”
He was amazed to see her sad eyes glint with humor. “So speaks the great marquess.”
She was teasing him from out of the depths of her fear. He smiled. “Why shouldn’t the great marquess have his say? I have to be good for something. Riding roughshod over my sisters is one my most venerable duties.”
That small sparkle faded. “I thank you for your kind invitation, my lord, and believe me, I accept. I accept wholeheartedly. But I cannot come with you at once. Although the scandal is baseless, Eamon has reason enough to want me at Castle Dar. If I come with you now he will simply demand me back.”
“Demand you back? You’re a full-grown woman. You can do as you choose. . . .” Even before the words were out of his mouth, Nick realized that the sentence he had just spoken only made sense after two centuries of struggle that had yet to happen.
“Where exactly have you spent these past three years, my lord? Among some Amazon tribe?”
“In all honesty, I cannot say,” he said, and it was almost true. “I—I had amnesia.”
“It must certainly have been somewhere quite different from England.”
“It was.”
She simply looked at him. She, who had known him as a child and now saw him as an adult. Nick couldn’t believe how good it felt to have that gap bridged. How good it felt just to have those ink-dark eyes rest on him, even with that quizzical look in them. “Then I’ll kill him,” he heard himself saying. “If he won’t allow to you to come to Blackdown with me now, I’ll kill him.”
She laughed. “You will have to make up your mind between the two options you give me. Either I am to do just as I please and walk out of the front door, or you are to kill him and carry me off like a pillaged sack of flour!”
She was right. He did sound like a maniac. He needed to get control of himself. Himselves. But he didn’t want to. Her laugh was enchanting. It was the same one he had heard yesterday as she galloped away toward the river. He wanted to kiss her. He Nick Davenant, and he Nicholas Falcott. For once they wanted the same thing.
He dropped his hand from where it rested on hers, to keep himself from grabbing it and pulling her to him. “What do you propose, then?”
She looked down the fields toward Blackdown. “I had been planning to run away. I could affect a bolt to London and come to you instead.”
Nick sucked in his cheeks. “But that would cement your bad reputation, and frankly it would besmirch my name as well.” He smiled. “And since I am as pure as snow and as guileless as a dove . . .”
She snorted. “Oh, indeed.”
The snort did it. Nick was lost. He stared at her like a mooncalf. Why shouldn’t he fall down on one knee right here and ask for her hand? He was Blackdown, at least partially. And she was an earl’s granddaughter. If it weren’t for the Guild he wouldn’t even hesitate. He would be expected to do it. Do it and then live happily ever goddamn after, day following day.
“My lord?”
He blinked.
“Is something amiss?”
“I . . . need to think.” He stepped closer to her. “I need to think, and I need to consult with Clare. Don’t run away. Don’t do anything. Just meet me here tomorrow.”
Her eyes widened, and he realized he was looming over her, demanding that she meet him again, unchaperoned. For God’s sake, the nineteenth century! It was ridiculous. “To make plans,” he said, stepping back.
“Of course.” She put her nose up, affecting not to have misunderstood him. Perfection. “That is, if Clare raises no objection to you trysting with the whore of Stoke Canon.”
“I shall be here, Julia, never you fear. Now let me toss you up.” He put his hands at her waist, felt the delicious swell of her hips, and in spite of all his instincts, which urged him to pull that beautiful derrière back against himself, he placed her neatly in her saddle, allowing his hand to rest for just a fraction of a second on her thigh.
She looked down at him, her eyes grave. Then, without saying anything more, she turned Marigold back toward the path through the woods. The horse made its careful way through the trees, soon disappearing into the shifting shade. Nick stood stock-still, staring after them. Then he yanked Boatswain’s head up from the grass, threw himself into the saddle, and galloped all the way back to Blackdown House.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Julia rode slowly through the woods. Blackdown was back from the dead. And just in time to help her.
She had recognized him immediately, but the longer they talked the less she could see the boy in the man in front of her. By the end of their conversation she had felt she was talking to a stranger. His eyes crinkled when he smiled. What had been dimples were now two deeply carved lines. He had a scar across his eyebrow.
Well, he had been in the wars, hadn’t he? He had been lost for three years. He must have been terribly injured, not to know himself for that long. Terrible things could age a man.
This new Blackdown was unsettling. The distance in his eyes had suddenly become a nearness that seemed to sear right through her. The strength she had felt in his arms when he helped her into the saddle. He was grown.
As was she. Twenty-two. Almost on the shelf, that’s how grown she was.
In other words, the years had flown. Time had passed. There was nothing strange in that.
Yet there was something off-kilter. Time had passed, but it had passed wrongly. Blackdown looked older than he should. And she, who had never seen the world, never been to a ball more grand than an impromptu minuet at a neighbor’s—she realized, in his presence, that she had not ever truly stepped across the thresh
old into adulthood, despite being too old to be young.
All her problems seemed to be about time.
She ducked her head to avoid a low-hanging bough. Do not borrow trouble from tomorrow. That had been Grandfather’s motto, and look what good it had done. It turned out that yesterday’s trouble had been brewing in Stoke Canon ever since she’d arrived. Some suspicion of her mother’s virtue, long buried, but ready to burst forth. The chicken-and-the-egg conundrum. Was she bad because her mother was bad, or was her poor dead mother being vilified only now that the daughter was in trouble?
Julia laughed bitterly. Because now she was, indeed, living down to her reputation. She had, after all, agreed to meet Blackdown again tomorrow. Julia would be the first to admit that she had been raised largely by accident, but it was wrong for a young woman to sneak off and meet a man alone in the woods. Even she knew that much about propriety.
As for Falcott, he was no paragon. He had put his ungloved hand on hers, when she reached up for her pommel, then left it there for ages. And then when he had tossed her up, for just a moment that hand had rested on her leg. She had looked at his hand, both times. The ring that had looked too big when he was young now suited his strength exactly. His hand was beautiful. More beautiful than the rest of him.
Did he believe she was Eamon’s mistress?
Marigold emerged from the woods and broke, unasked, into a trot. Julia welcomed the jolting gait. Maybe it would bring her back to herself. Because it didn’t matter what the marquess thought. What mattered was that she now had an invitation to Falcott House, the invitation that she desperately needed. The grandeur of his title and his home, the unquestionable virtue of his sister and her chaperonage—her honor would be salvaged. All she had to do was find a way to leave Castle Dar.
* * *
“So. You disobey me.” Eamon stood in the doorway, watching her climb the steps.