Games of Pleasure

by Julia Ross

  His mouth set, as stubborn as a wayward child’s. “I only know what I experienced.”

  Miracle walked up to him. “You experienced good sex with a courtesan, that’s all. And now you stand there in all your shining armor, prating your ideals of chivalry, and try to demand intimacy?”

  He spun about and strode away, his boots echoing harshly. “I doubt that intimacy is something one can demand, but if you deny that any semblance of it exists or ever existed between us, then how the devil is it won?”

  Distress beat at her heart. “I don’t know! Intimacy isn’t something I pursue. I know only how to charm a man into parting with money and jewels and the provision of a roof over my head and food on my table. I do it by satisfying his desires, by fulfilling his fantasies, by sweetening his bad tempers, by making him feel more powerful and alive and infinitely more potent than his friends.”

  He strode off down the nave, speaking over his shoulder. “You asked for the truth and I gave it.”

  “Then I didn’t know what I was asking.”

  “And it would seem,” he said, spinning about to face her, “that your judgments are just as rash as any of those of which you would accuse me.”

  “Perhaps they are! I owe you my life, but I don’t owe you any particular accuracy of judgment.”

  “Accuracy? No, I don’t expect that. But I think I might lay claim to a little more generosity.”

  The temptation to simply trap him into becoming her lover again was almost overwhelming. Miracle clenched her fists and fought against the longing. Had any saint ever fought harder to drive away a treasure in order to avoid mortal sin?

  “I am being generous. I don’t forget what I owe you. But it’s no kindness to pretend to offer more than one can give. Yet why did your memory of this scene with your brother intrude into your thoughts so forcefully when you carried me down from the loft? What the devil did it have to do with me?”

  The large cross framed him, the altar standing cold and hard at his back. “I’ve no idea.”

  “Because you understand nothing of your own carnal desires, do you? Yes, you were shocked when you saw your brother and his wife-to-be making love at that fountain, but you were also aroused by it, weren’t you?”

  “For God’s sake!” Beauty threw up her head as her master’s voice echoed through the cavernous spaces.

  Miracle crouched down at the base of the font. She wrapped both arms about her knees and stared up at the soaring arches, the pure lines of an architecture of devotion: quiet and awe-inspiring and filled with an ancient awareness of the transcendent.

  “Why deny it? I don’t mean this harshly, Ryder, and no doubt your feelings were overlain very bitterly by your sense of betrayal, by your gallant concern for Anne, by your disillusionment in your brother. But have you ever tossed up a woman’s skirts in a garden? Have you ever made frantic love on the edge of a fountain—simply from the urgency of that overwhelming need—while water cascaded unregarded over your head? Or has Galahad only given way to impulsive lust just one time in his life: when a professional seduced him into a haze of forgetfulness, and let him think for a moment that he’d fallen in love?”

  “Do you want to make me regret telling you?” His boots rang as he strode back down the aisle toward her.

  “No, I want us to be honest.”

  “I’m not Galahad. But if I did think for one moment that I might have fallen in love with you, devil take it, then you’ve just disabused me of any such absurdity.”

  “Then don’t try to claim that what we shared was true intimacy. I used you. I paid with my body for a horse and a saddle. That’s what I do. It’s how I survive. And I’m very skilled at it.”

  Beauty shied as another drumbeat of thunder rolled across the church roof.

  Ice had invaded her bones, freezing the marrow. She must strip him of his romance and his quixotic ideals, and, if she could, she must send him away as soon as possible, for his own sake as well as hers. Yet he stopped in front of her, his boots splattered with mud, his thighs powerful and lean, and his energy hit her with the force of a wave.

  “That may be true, yet perhaps I felt that you ought to know that—while I may have misjudged my brother—I won’t judge you, whatever you’ve done. I’m capable of impulsive action in the face of extreme provocation, but I still try to do what’s right. I pulled you from the sea with the signs of a beating fresh on your skin. Those bruises still mark your face. Whenever I look at you, they fill me with fresh rage at your attacker. Whether we share intimacy or not, honor makes its own demands.”

  She glanced up at all that arrogance and power. Though his force was now blunted by distress, she thought that if she held up her palms, the passion of his soul could warm them.

  “And so you felt you must offer me something painful of your own, before you could demand that I tell you what really happened in Dorset? You’re more generous than I am, Ryder.”

  “Am I? If there’s any truth to that at all, perhaps it’s only because life has been more generous to me. I have less at risk. Yet there’s no kindness in forcing your confidences in exchange for mine. When you wish to tell me the truth, then do so.”

  “Don’t you see, my lord, that I wish you were not such a good man? For however I might shrink from telling you the truth, now I very definitely owe it. But why do you really want to know?”

  “Perhaps you’re just a mystery to which I want answers.”

  “Mystery? What mystery?”

  His ocean-green eyes betrayed only anguish, intense and passionate. His mouth, made for kisses and laughter, was pressed into taut lines of concern. “For God’s sake, Miracle! You don’t need to be afraid.”

  She laughed in open defiance of her own feelings, then picked up the remains of her bread and walked away to give it to the horses. “Why shouldn’t I be afraid? I’m trapped between two mad lords and the hangman!”

  Jim gulped the crusts from her palm. Beauty took hers with delicate velvet lips, while watching her master from a liquid brown eye.

  Ryder strode up to stand behind Miracle. He draped the cloak about her shoulders, holding the fabric close on each side of her chin.

  “Hanley isn’t mad. Far from it. He calculates everything he does.”

  She turned to look up at him. “And you? The perfect knight, hiding his seething passions beneath a frigid coat of shining armor?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I am.” He gazed down at her as if he looked into the depths of a well. “What matters is what Hanley is. Yes, he’ll be remorseless in his quest for revenge over the death of his friend. Yet, though he wouldn’t shrink from personal violence if it suited him, at heart the earl’s a cold fish.”

  Miracle studied his face. “You know him that well?”

  “He and I went to the same school.”

  “But surely he’s some years older than you?”

  The chill light cast blue shadows beneath his jaw, glimmered coldly over his cheekbones. “Three, to be precise. Yet we have reason to despise each other. Whenever social occasions force us together now, it’s very much the way one cat might acknowledge another.”

  “With a certain chilly disdain?”

  He turned and walked away. “It’s a little deeper than that: more of an intense animosity.”

  A bright spark of rage and fear flared beneath her ribs, radiating pain. “You and Lord Hanley are enemies?”

  “In some sense, yes, I suppose so.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” She grasped a handful of Jim’s mane to steady herself. “God save me from white-clad knights!”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “Oh, only a little! Of course, you were bound to know him. The peerage consists of a limited number of great families, after all. Yet this particular peer is a personal enemy of yours, though you simply forgot to mention that before.”

  “I didn’t think it was important.”

  “Not important? When you’ve given Lord Hanley yet anot
her reason to hunt me down: not only to take revenge on the mistress who murdered his best friend, but also to have it out with an old antagonist—yourself!”

  He strode back, holding out both hands. “Hanley doesn’t know that we’re together. Even if he finds out, it would only be to discover that the quarry is now more dangerous than the huntsman.”

  “Why? Because you outrank him?”

  “No, because he has reason to appreciate that I’m not so easy to intimidate.”

  “And this is meant to reassure me?” She hefted her saddle onto Jim’s back. “God, I thought you so upright and honest. Now I learn that you’ve been keeping secrets from me all along.”

  “I just told you something that I’ve never told another living soul.”

  “Yes, yes, and it breaks my heart as your brother broke yours. Yet you also neglected to reveal that you’re not a disinterested party in all this. It simply slipped your mind to inform me that you’ve a feud with Lord Hanley. Which—whether you like it or not—makes for a damned dangerous game for the pawns, caught openly on the board as a duke’s son masses his snow-white knights against the red men of an earl. It would seem that every man I ever met only wishes to play me for a fool—even Sir Galahad!”

  “That’s not true!”

  She tugged the pony forward and opened the door. The bright scent of wet grass and damp earth poured into the church. The head-stones sparkled as if sprinkled with silver. Miracle scrambled into the saddle and turned the pony’s head to the north.

  Beauty neighed and tossed her red mane. Ryder set his saddle on her back and buckled the girth. The mare’s hooves rang as he led her out of the church.

  “That’s not true!” he insisted.

  “Then what is true, my lord?” Miracle asked. “That you fell in love with a mirage just before midnight, and will try every scullery maid in the kingdom to find the one female whose foot fits your imaginary glass slipper?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  WYLDSHAY CASTLE ROSE LIKE A MAILED FIST FROM THE broad waters of a lake. The Earl of Hanley gazed up at the towers as his coach horses trotted over the arched stone bridge and beneath the portcullis. He stepped down into a courtyard. A pair of tall oak doors were immediately flung open on silent hinges by two bewigged footmen.

  Wyldshay was excruciatingly well run.

  “Is Lord Ryderbourne at home?” he asked as a more senior servant came forward. “Or perhaps the duchess?”

  The man led him into the Great Hall, where he was kept waiting. Stone dragons leered at him from the fireplace. On another wall St. George wrestled with a rearing white horse as he speared a green serpent to the heart. Yet when he was eventually led into an elegant parlor, the Duchess of Blackdown walked up to greet him with both hands extended, as if he were a long-lost son.

  “Hanley? How very charming! To what happy chance do we owe this unexpected visit?”

  The earl bowed low over her rings. “The happiness is all mine, Your Grace.”

  She sat down in a rustle of skirts and waved him to a chair. “Yet handsome young men do not pay surprise calls on their mother’s friends without good cause, do they? No doubt you really came to see Ryderbourne. Alas, he is not at home.”

  He buried the small rush of triumph. “Alas, indeed! Yet when I met him on the road, he expressly said he was driving here. Perhaps I misunderstood? He has returned to London, instead?”

  Her eyes were brilliant, like those of a pagan idol. “You met my son on the road?”

  “We enjoyed breakfast together at the White Swan on the Bristol turnpike.”

  Her smile seemed a little bored. “Then he must indeed be at Wyldshay. Perhaps he has gone down to the coast, or is making his rounds of the farms. I have no idea. I do not keep track of my son’s movements, Lord Hanley. By all means, go in search of him, if you wish.”

  He stood up. “Alas, Your Grace, I have pressing business. I can’t stay. I wished merely to pay my respects before traveling on.”

  She called a servant to see him out. Hanley strode back to his waiting carriage. His man was waiting to fold up the steps and close the door.

  “Well?” the earl asked.

  The servant touched his hat with one finger. “The duchess already knows that Lord Ryderbourne isn’t in London, my lord. She sent a servant up to town with a message for him, but the man returned empty-handed this morning. And the groom says his carriage returned here several hours ago, but His Lordship wasn’t in it.” The man grinned. “You might say he’s disappeared, like.”

  “Then we return to the White Swan as fast as these damned nags can carry us!”

  The duchess watched from a window as the carriage rattled across the bridge. Her mouth curved when it turned north.

  “Ah, my dear boy,” she said to herself. “So where are you? Wherever it is, I rather hope you are having an adventure.”

  RYDER allowed Miracle to ride away alone. The white pony cantered up the wet path toward the hill track. Beauty fretted, eager to follow, yet he held the mare in check, fighting memories.

  If the earl had appeared on the horizon at that moment, Ryder would have been tempted to shoot him down without mercy. Not with the confused rage that had once made him try to hit his brother without warning, but with an ice-cold desire for justice.

  Apart from his fury over Hanley, it was almost impossible to sort out his feelings about Miracle. He knew only that he could not let her slip away into disaster. Whether she wanted his help or not, he would pursue her to the ends of the earth. Though what he would do when they reached the world’s end, he had no idea.

  He was under no illusion about sharing any real future with her. Wyldshay was not just his duty. It was his love and his passion, and had been since the day he had first opened his eyes and seen the great inheritance into which he’d been born. He glanced down at his hands, clenched too hard on the reins.

  Miracle could enslave any man with her sensual beauty and she knew it. For perhaps the first time in her life she was trying not to do it, instead. That perhaps could’ve been seen—in a rather back-handed way—as a compliment, even when she was so obviously failing.

  Ryder eased his fingers and choked back a kind of mad, frustrated mirth at his own impotence in this.

  Even if he thought he could somehow clear her of the charge of murder, what could he offer her? To install her in a townhouse in London as his mistress? Perhaps in the very same rooms where she had so recently been welcoming his enemy? The idea repulsed him. In the face of that, even his burning desire seemed only tarnished and sordid.

  The wealth and power of the Blackdowns was almost infinite. Ryder outranked every man in the kingdom, except for the handful of dukes and marquises. That knowledge had both haunted and enthralled him all of his life. As long as he could remember, if he reached out a hand he could have almost anything he desired.

  It was a little disconcerting to realize that this time he had no idea what he wanted.

  Miracle was almost out of sight before he allowed Beauty to follow.

  SHE rode blindly, tears coursing down her cheeks. Surely he could not follow her now, not after what she had said to him. She would ride on to Derbyshire, recover her valuables from her brother, take a ship to America, and never see or think of her white knight again. Every scullery maid in the kingdom understood perfectly well how any real prince would treat her, whatever fantastic promises he made at the ball. And perhaps it was a kindness, too, to remind the prince of that, before he made too great a fool of himself.

  At least the storm had blown itself out. A bright breeze blustered from the west, drying out her sodden clothes and promising a dry night. Still, it would be miserable to camp too near the track that hugged the exposed hilltops. As the night drew in, she rode Jim down into a little valley. Before long she found a sheltered spot where a spring bubbled out of the rocky escarpment. The place seemed hidden enough to risk a small fire.

  She hobbled the pony and turned him loose to graze, then hunted under the t
rees for some dry sticks. Once she had them burning, Miracle lay for a long time wrapped in her cloak staring up at the sky.

  The same cold stars glimmered down on every hamlet and village and town, every great country house, every field and factory and workshop in England. Their thin light sparkled on the Channel and the Severn Estuary and the Irish Sea. Those identical stars sent their faint phosphorescence to haunt the sails of His Majesty’s navy and every flotilla of small fishing boats, flung far across the sea, until at last they disappeared over the curve of the horizon to discover new oceans sparkling beneath the Southern Cross.

  Many, many years ago the wonder of it all had enchanted a young girl who had once been allowed to stare up through a telescope, after so many years of sleeping in darkness. How could she have imagined that the same starlight was beating down onto the dark head of a lonely young lord, who listened with heartbreaking intensity for the music of the spheres?

  She closed her eyes and buried her face in her arms.

  So he had robbed her even of this: the chill comfort of infinity.

  RYDER found a perch among the roots of a great tree, where he could see into her little clearing without being seen and keep watch as she slept. When her fire burned down, he gathered more wood with infinite caution, his boots easing into the damp ground with each careful step. Burning with frustrated desire, he added more fuel to the fire. When she turned in her sleep, he tucked the cloak back around her shoulders without waking her, then crept away.

  The night creaked and rustled with small sounds—a mouse nibbling, a stoat hunting—then quavered with the long-drawn cry of an owl. Ryder wrapped himself in his cloak and stared at the sky. How many years had it been since he had allowed himself to sit and do nothing like this?

  A strange mixture of elation and unease tickled at the back of his mind. For the limited duration of this adventure, he had no truly weighty responsibilities, only the simple demands of a journey without his usual entourage. No ducal carriage. No liveried servants. Just himself, a sleeping woman, and the vast, rustling world.