Games of Pleasure

by Julia Ross

  She had left him one satin slipper.

  And memories—

  He stood up with a curse and strode to the door. Even if he went after her, she had several hours’ head start. If she had wished for further help from him, she would have stayed and asked for it. Instead she was forsworn. She had broken her clear promise.

  The episode was over. He would very probably never see her again. He had a life of his own that demanded all of his time.

  He stalked out into the yard, where the sun shouted for his attention and his horse lifted its head and nickered. Jenkins relinquished the reins. Ryder swung into the saddle. As soon as he was clear of the village, he urged the gelding into a ground-eating trot, then a flat-out gallop, only stopping when he reached the first tollhouse.

  The keeper stepped out and touched one finger to his cap.

  For a moment Ryder was tempted to ask after a chestnut with a map of Ireland on its rump. Instead, he reached into the pocket of his waistcoat for a coin. His fingers encountered a folded slip of paper.

  Shock raised the hairs on the back of his neck. He took one glance at the front of it—at his name, Lord Ryderbourne, inscribed in black ink in a woman’s flowing hand—then crushed the note in his fist before thrusting it back. He found some pennies in another pocket and dropped the correct money into the toll collector’s hand.

  With her crumpled message burning against his heart, he rode home.

  The walls of Wyldshay soared from their lake: that magical fortress of stone and water. His destiny.

  Just before he left the trees to ride along the final approach to the arched bridge, Ryder pulled up his horse. He reached into his saddlebag. The ivory satin slipper lay mute in his hand, empty of her erotic white foot. Why the devil had he felt he must keep it?

  The gelding moved restively, anxious to return to its stable.

  Ryder slid the slipper into his coat pocket, then reached for the note still lying over his heart: the memento that he had not set there himself, that must have been slipped where only he would find it, while his clothes were still hanging to dry in the kitchen.

  It seemed like a terrible temptation, to read what she had said: excuses, apologies, pleas, lies?

  The St. George banner flew from the highest tower of Wyldshay, the wind whipping the distant fabric. Swallows wheeled over the island that held his childhood home and his future inheritance. This was his reality and his life. The slipper and the note were both irrelevant. He would throw them out as soon as he reached his own rooms. One night’s madness with a married stranger would sink eventually into his distant past, to be mused over, then forgotten.

  Leaving her note where it lay, Ryder dropped his hand back to the reins and rode his horse home.

  MIRACLE dismissed her guide and watched the man ride away, back toward the coast, back toward the Merry Monarch and the fishing village. Dawn cast its long shadows through the faint mist that lay over the fields and cliffs. She had left the duke’s son deeply asleep in their disordered bed—the loveliest man she had ever known.

  The memory burned in her heart. Would he feel betrayed and abandoned? Would he think that she had robbed him? Probably of his honor, at least. He had tried so hard to play the gentleman. He had not really wanted to become her lover. Though she had never met anyone like him before, she could guess how he would feel.

  He would be angry, of course. Angry, or disgusted, or even a little humiliated. But she knew men. He would soon dismiss their encounter as an irrelevant episode, a sweet memory destined to fade into nothingness.

  She did not think he would persecute her, even after he read the note, thrust into his waistcoat pocket where he’d find it at the first tollbooth. Neither did she think he would try to intervene any further to save her from her fate. He might even accept that he had made a lucky escape, once he knew who she was.

  And that was definitely for the best.

  In a blind reach for optimism, she turned her horse’s head and rode on. Not toward London. Hanley must be on her trail by now, and the capital was too obvious. Instead she rode north. She would lose herself in a tangle of byways, where she still had a chance.

  In the meantime, she owned a horse and saddle, a warm cloak, a change of clothes, and food. When Lord Ryderbourne had refused her a loan, it had seemed fair enough to trade him her favors for what she so desperately needed. To take his money without his permission would simply have been theft. If Miracle had other reasons to feel uncomfortable about trading coins for what they had shared, she did not want to face them.

  For several hours she saw no one but farm workers. Curious glances and the occasional open stare followed her. A lady in a brown habit riding alone with no manservant. To be so noticeable was a definite risk, but to travel on foot would have been worse. On foot she’d be too slow and too vulnerable. And though she had supplies for a few days, she had no money for a coach fare.

  She would find abandoned barns or odd nooks where she could spend the nights wrapped in his cloak, the horse turned loose to graze in the rope hobbles. She would use the least public of roads. When she arrived at Dillard’s house in Derbyshire, she could collect her savings and buy passage from Liverpool.

  If she was lucky, she would stay one step ahead of pursuit. If she was lucky, she might yet escape.

  Miracle had ridden hour after hour, steadily covering the miles, when she heard it. She halted her horse. The gelding threw up its head. She circled, her heart thundering, before she let her mount feel the cut of her whip. In a spray of mud, the horse leaped forward.

  Yet the sound followed her like a nightmare, coming and going at each bend in the road or break in the hedge: the baying of hounds.

  RYDER trotted his mount over the bridge and beneath the portcullis. He swung down as a groom ran out to take the gelding. Without a backward glance, the duke’s son strode into the Great Hall at Wyldshay, throwing aside hat and gloves as he did so.

  Servants bowed and scurried. “My lord!”

  He took the stairs two at a time, then strode down the endless hallways to the Whitchurch Wing, the set of rooms reserved for his personal use ever since he’d left the nursery. The house shouted his identity: St. George fluttered on tapestries, stared arrogantly from paintings, butchered writhing dragons carved into stone. Beneath lintels and beams, across ceilings, in the carved turn of balusters, the family motto or the name of St. George stamped its way into every inhabitant’s consciousness.

  Lord Ryderbourne, the castle insisted, Laurence Duvall Devoran St. George. You are home!

  One of his secretaries looked up as he stalked into the estate offices that lay near his private rooms.

  The man scrambled to his feet. “My lord!”

  “We had an appointment this morning at ten, Mr. Davis,” Ryder said. “I was delayed. Was it anything urgent?”

  It was urgent, of course. All estate business was urgent, always. The Blackdowns controlled over twenty thousand acres in Dorset, and countless acres and estates in other counties. The duchy employed stewards and secretaries, agents and housekeepers, yet someone in the family had to hold all of those reins together. Someone had to make the final decisions.

  As he had grown older, the duke had delegated that task piece by piece to his eldest son. Now Ryder ran almost everything.

  He worked straight through the afternoon and evening, only stopping when he realized that the secretary’s face was gray with fatigue.

  “I didn’t intend to drive you so hard, Mr. Davis,” he said. “Take off what’s left of the day. Tomorrow as well, if you like. I can finish this.”

  “It’s my pleasure to work with you, my lord,” the secretary said. “I’ll take a rest when we’re done.”

  Ryder smiled at him. “No flattery, sir. Take a break. Get something to eat, for God’s sake! There’s nothing left here now that can’t wait until later.”

  “It’s not flattery, my lord,” Davis said. “I meant it. It’s both an honor and a joy to work with Your Lordship.” />
  The man left the room. Ryder sat back and stretched, a little bemused. Davis might even be telling him the truth, though that would—always and forever—be impossible to ascertain. It was simply part of Ryder’s life that he would never be able to distinguish flattery from friendship with any certainty.

  Probably, he thought with a wry smile, why he had so few real friends!

  When the door opened again, he looked up, expecting to see Davis. Instead he scrambled to his feet and bowed.

  “Your Grace!”

  Tiny, exquisite, his mother walked into the room. She gazed at him with his own eyes, green as glass. From her blond hair to her shoes she embodied perfection. It was a perfection that Ryder had always longed to encompass, yet knew he never could.

  “Are you mad, Ryderbourne?” she asked. “What are you doing in here?”

  “I’m managing our properties,” he said. “That’s what I do. Though not somewhere Your Grace normally visits, this room forms part of our estate offices.”

  She raised her fair brows as if he had said he were studying slugs. “We employ stewards to see to the estates. You are my eldest son. You left home yesterday morning to offer marriage to Lady Belinda Carhart, a pretty girl of little brain but much consequence. However flawed a judgment about the fair sex that choice may have demonstrated, you claimed to be in love with her. Fortunately, Lady Belinda is qualified by birth, if nothing else, to become my successor one day. It may or may not have occurred to you that the results of that interview would be of interest to others besides yourself.”

  He felt dumbstruck, but he told her the simple truth. “I apologize, Your Grace. I had forgotten.”

  The duchess walked away to study a print on the wall: the classical facade of Wrendale, one of the duchy houses in Derbyshire. Her straight back was eloquent with exasperation.

  “Forgotten? That you are affianced, or that you are not?”

  The smallest curl of amusement, along with real surprise at himself, forced him to smile. Lady Belinda and the humiliation of her refusal had not crossed his mind since—Ryder took a deep breath. Not since he had seen a small boat foundering in the ocean. It was almost as if his proposal of marriage had happened in another lifetime, one now entirely irrelevant.

  “She refused me,” he said.

  The ribbons on his mother’s dress wavered slightly, as if in an invisible breeze. “Did she say why?”

  “I frighten her. She’s going to marry Asterley.”

  The duchess stood in silence for a moment, keeping her back to her son. When she spoke again, her voice was as fine as a sharpened steel blade. “Asterley? How very squalid of her! Yet you do not seem to care so very much.”

  “I thought that I did.”

  She turned. Her eyes searched his face. “But now you do not? What has happened in the meantime to change your mind?”

  He stood his ground, smiling down into her green gaze, his arms crossed over his chest. The crushed slip of paper lay over his heart, scalding into his awareness. It had been smoldering there, like a volcano, during all the long hours he had spent poring over papers with Davis. He had forgotten Lady Belinda. He had not forgotten his mystery lady.

  “That’s rather my business, Your Grace.”

  “Because you stopped for the night at the Merry Monarch in Brockton to drown your sorrows,” she said. “If you remember, you sent a message that the storm had delayed you. Yet drink is a coward’s way out.”

  It rankled. “You would not call Jack a coward to his face.”

  “Because, whatever his other faults, my younger son has the courage of a dragon.”

  Ryder took another deep breath. Why the devil hadn’t he already destroyed the note? He had no intention of reading it.

  “That’s true, but the real reason is that you love Jack better than life and always have. It’s all right. I came to terms with that fact many years ago. I’m sorry that my brother has broken your heart by leaving England for India with his new bride. That does not give you the right to insult me.”

  “Nor you the right to resent it, if I choose to upbraid you. I am your mother, sir.”

  “How could I ever forget, Your Grace? But my message last night told you only half of the truth about why I was delayed. There was far too much wine, of course, but I also drowned my sorrows in the embrace of another man’s wife.”

  The duchess did not hesitate. “Then at least you behaved like a man.”

  He threw back his head and laughed aloud. His mother would never cease to amaze him. Of course, she amazed everyone, slaying hearts and gathering sycophants wherever she set her daintily shod foot.

  “You’re not surprised?” he asked at last.

  A quirk appeared at one corner of her mouth. “I am shocked to the core. My virtuous firstborn son! How fortunate that your sisters are away, touring the Lakes with their aunt!”

  “You would rather I were not so virtuous, Your Grace?”

  “I would rather that you were engaged to marry. Though I may not have been too impressed by her brilliance, Lady Belinda Carhart would have known how to behave as a duchess, at least. You had better tell the duke that he is once again obliged to delay his hopes for a legitimate grandchild.”

  “Jack and Anne will have sons,” Ryder said. “The line is perfectly secure, whether I marry or not.”

  “There are other issues at stake.”

  “Because freedom suits Jack so much better than the burden of being my heir? Even though you cannot bear it that he has always refused to stay by your side, you don’t want my brother to be hampered by the duties of the dukedom, do you?”

  The curve of her neck seemed almost deliberately vulnerable beneath her blond hair. “Don’t blame me for loving him too much, Ryderbourne! Though you were as robust as a bull from the beginning, I was afraid for the first five years of his life that your brother was too delicate to survive. He almost died when he was born. Did you know that?”

  “I’m amazed. I thought you loved Jack better than me simply because he blazed such a brilliant path through all of our hearts.”

  She set her hand on the jamb, the elegant fingers glimmering with rings. Her knuckles shone white. “There is that, too, of course. The whole world is in love with him. But you are my eldest son and the heir to one of the greatest estates in England. Whatever Jonathan’s gifts, you will make a better duke. You must wed wisely and it were better if it were soon. Go to London! Take up an invitation to visit some of the right families at their country homes this summer. Find a child who’s so impressed with your prospects that she forgets to be afraid of you.”

  The idea repelled him. Yet he had offered for Lady Belinda Carhart. What the hell would he have done if she had accepted his suit?

  “I cannot spare the time right now to leave Wyldshay. Unlike Jack and my little sisters, I have responsibilities here.”

  “Nonsense! What you call duty, my dear boy, is only a way to escape the other half of your destiny.”

  “To marry wisely?”

  “To dazzle society—in a wave of scandal and disrepute, if need be. Then you must marry your future duchess, of course. But why not try a little rebellion and outrage first?”

  “I cannot become Jack, Mother,” he said. “I’ll never match him.”

  “No, of course not.” She smiled, almost as if she loved him, too. “Your brother is unique. So, of course, are you. However, if you have trained the staff as you should, there is nothing to keep you here that cannot be delegated. And now, if you would be kind enough to dress for dinner to join the duke and myself in the dining room, we may all pretend once again to be civilized.”

  THE horse shook and sweated beneath her. Miracle allowed it to drop to a walk, then she dismounted and led the tired animal by the reins. She had outrun them, whoever it was. Perhaps just a farmer with a couple of dogs. Perhaps just the local Master of Foxhounds exercising the pack, or even a foxhunt in full cry. She could not remember clearly enough now to interpret what she had heard wit
h any certainty. She had just fled along lane after lane into a maze of unknown countryside.

  The track ahead of her cut up through a miniature gorge. High above, trees overhung the banks, shutting out almost all of the remaining daylight. The surface underfoot was as wet as a streambed. She had no idea where she was, but she struggled on, her boots sliding in the mud. At the top of the gorge the lane broke out into open fields. A thick wood lay a small distance away to the right.

  Fighting exhaustion, Miracle opened a gate and led the horse along a dirt path toward the trees. At the edge of the wood she found a small hut, the roof half fallen, the clamber of ivy over the ruined walls rustling with mice and small birds. A pile of old straw lay heaped in one corner.

  She crouched to put the rope hobbles about the horse’s pasterns, then unbuckled the girth and pulled off both saddle and bridle. The faithful animal dropped its head to crop at the turf as she rubbed it down with a twist of the straw. Still grazing, the horse moved away with constricted little strides, and Miracle entered the hut.

  Some leaf litter in the outer corner was cleaner than the straw. She propped the saddle there so that the leather skirts and the pad made a nest. Leaning back against it, she ate some cheese and bread, then chewed an apple down to the core. Every muscle ached, not only from riding and walking, but from the blows that Willcott had given her. A small shiver ran down her spine.

  Miracle tossed the apple core to the horse and blinked back the foolish sting of tears. Whatever happened now, she was determined to regret nothing—not even last night!

  The darkness deepened. She took off the brown habit to hang it from a nail and slipped on the ivory silk dress—without the black net overdress—to use as a nightgown. Whisper-soft fabric caressed. Oranges and lavender.

  Dismissing the images, she wrapped herself in his cloak and curled up to sleep. The scent of man and sea enveloped her: another heartbreaking reminder of that heady encounter with a duke’s son.

  Somewhere not too far away running water trickled over stones. An owl hooted softly in the woods. Its long, mournful cry mingled with the gurgling brook, as if the bird called the name that would haunt her dreams for the rest of her life: Lord Ryderbourne. Lord Ryderbourne.