Impetuous

by Candace Camp

  Miss Yorke’s eyes glowed. Cassandra suspected that the governess might have a tendre for her handsome employer.

  “Sir Philip has done a great deal for his children,” Cassandra said carefully.

  “My, yes. Most people pay no attention to such children, just hurry past them on the street—if they even notice them. But Sir Philip is the soul of kindness. Not only does he clothe and feed them, and even give them an education, he takes the time to come and visit them. To talk and play with them. That is most uncommon. Most charity, if given at all, is limited to money. But Sir Philip gives of himself. He is genuinely interested in their progress.”

  Cassandra’s uneasy feeling was growing by leaps and bounds. Why were there only boys?

  Miss Yorke showed her through the spacious kitchen, where a woman was busily cooking a pot of stew, and they stopped to look out the back door into the yard, where Sir Philip was engaged in a game of cricket with several boys. Quite a few more sat by, watching the game. Cassandra noticed a young boy with a horribly contorted spine and two boys on crutches.

  “There are so many of them,” she murmured.

  “Yes.” Miss Yorke seemed pleased, though she frowned. “We are bursting at the seams. Lionel will be leaving soon. He is so talented that Sir Philip was able to get him apprenticed at the Wedgwood factory. But even then, we will have over twenty boys. I don’t know what we are going to do. We have already converted the attic into a dormitory room for the younger boys.”

  As Miss Yorke led her back down the hallway into the small room that served as her office, Cassandra asked bluntly, “Where do the boys come from?”

  “All over.” Sarah gestured her toward a chair. “Would you like some tea?”

  Cassandra shook her head. “No, thank you. You were saying…”

  “Oh, yes, where the boys come from. I believe Sir Philip caught John trying to pick his pocket in London.”

  “Pick his pocket!”

  Miss Yorke nodded. “You see how good Sir Philip is? He could have had him thrown in jail. Instead he took him into his household, had the servants take care of him and feed him. But he could tell that it was not the best solution. And he could see how many more boys like John there were in London and, indeed, all over the countryside. That is when he came up with the idea for Silverwood. He knew that the owner of this house had died, and that the heirs wanted to sell it. He thought it would be a perfect place to raise boys. So he bought it and hired me—saving my life, as I told you, in the process of saving the boys, too. We started out with four boys, but Sir Philip continues to bring back unwanted children. Dennis, whom you met, is the most recent. Sir Philip found him begging on the streets of Manchester. He found several of the others doing the same thing, or stealing so they could eat.”

  Cassandra felt numb. “But I—I had been told that Silverwood housed Sir Philip’s illegitimate children.”

  “Oh! That vicious rumor!” Miss Yorke’s eyes flashed. “It still persists. People seem to prefer to believe the worst about people rather than the best. Of course they are not Sir Philip’s illegitimate children. They are simply poor orphans whom everyone else has abandoned.”

  Tears pricked at Cassandra’s eyelids. Sir Philip had done a tremendously kind and humane thing, and she had accused him of being a vile seducer, of insulting his mother by placing his by-blows in a home so near to Haverly House. Cassandra wanted to sink through the floor. How could she have been so hasty in her judgment, so ready to believe the worst of him? He must despise her now for the things she had said to him.

  She stayed on, listening to Sarah talk about the boys and Sir Philip’s philosophy of education and the various subjects they taught them. She contributed very little to the conversation, for she was too stunned to think very clearly. Her mind hummed with regrets and painful memories of the things she had said and the way she had acted toward Philip. She felt sunk in guilt, and when Philip finally came back into the house, she could not even look him in the face.

  They stayed for luncheon with the boys who, because it was summer, ate beneath the trees on two long trestle tables. Cassandra watched them pack away an incredible amount of food with an air of being seriously at work. Only toward the end of the meal did they begin to talk and laugh and jostle each other.

  She was amazed at the happy spirit among them, children of the most unfortunate circumstances. She was also struck by the ease with which Sir Philip mingled with them, tousling one’s hair, patting another on the shoulder, making fish faces for the youngest, Harry. Something warm and sweet swelled within her as she watched him, mixing with the bitter rue that had plagued her since the moment she had realized how much she had wronged him. Tears sprang into her eyes, and she had to turn away so that no one would see them.

  After the meal, they left. Cassandra bade Miss Yorke and the children goodbye and walked out to the trap beside Philip, still silent and unable to look at him. He gave her a hand up into the vehicle, and they drove down the drive away from the house, giving a final wave as they turned out into the lane.

  Cassandra gazed out at the scenery, her hands clenched in her lap. She swallowed, then said tightly, “Obviously I owe you an apology.”

  He glanced at her. “I didn’t take you there for an apology.”

  “Nevertheless, I have to give one. I was wrong, terribly wrong. I insulted you, blamed you for—for—seducing young women when all the time you were doing something magnanimous and kind. No wonder your mother and sister seemed so proud of you! I should have known when I heard the way they talked about Silverwood and you.” She turned and glared at him. “Why didn’t you tell me? You knew what I thought! Why didn’t you explain it the other day? Why did you allow me to go on thinking that—that—”

  “I find that people usually believe what they want to,” Philip said in a world-weary voice. “It is a constant source of amazement to me that what people want to believe is always the worst.”

  “I didn’t want to!” Cassandra cried. “I tried not to.”

  He pulled off onto the side of the road and stopped beneath a stand of trees. He turned to face her.

  “Then why did you? Why did you trust the rumors over what you knew of me?”

  “It was what Aunt Ardis told me. She said that everyone said you were a rake, a libertine. That you had even set up a house for your illegitimate children. I told her that it was absurd, but then, when we got to Haverly House, you and Lady Neville started talking about Silverwood, and I realized that there really was a house of children. And—and your mother called them ‘your children.’”

  Philip groaned. “She didn’t mean that they were really my children. It was just an expression.”

  “I realize that now. But I didn’t then. All I could think was that Aunt Ardis was right—that you really did have a house filled with your by-blows.”

  “And that I had the audacity to set them up a few miles down the road from my mother and grandmother. How could you believe I would do that? How could you think that I have been spending my adult life procreating? Spreading my seed throughout England like a rutting bull, with no regard to consequences!”

  “I didn’t see how not to believe it!” Cassandra retorted. “The evidence was there right under my nose. The house that Aunt Ardis had told me about. Your mother and Georgette calling them your children. What else was I supposed to think?”

  “You could have come to me.” Anger burned brightly in his eyes. “You could have asked me if it was true.”

  “I still wouldn’t have known the truth. If you were the sort of man who went about seducing and abandoning young ladies, why would you have hesitated to lie about it?”

  “Why do you insist on my seducing young ladies? Even bastard children don’t necessarily mean I callously picked young innocents to dally with.”

  “But that is what the rumors said. That is wha
t Aunt Ardis told me—and if they were right about the house for bastard children, then it would imply that they were right about everything else. Aunt Ardis pointed out that it is more likely the young and innocent who get trapped with a baby. She said an older woman, an experienced, professional sort of woman, would know how to avoid it.” Cassandra blushed, but she looked up squarely into his eyes. “Besides, I knew, you see, how expert you were at the art of seduction. I—you—well, I had experienced your kisses.” Her voice faltered, but she pressed on. “I knew that you were a man of great passion, that you knew how to make a woman, uh…” She cleared her throat, her face aflame with embarrassment. “I knew that you had been seducing me.”

  “I wasn’t!” he exclaimed. “I mean— Well, it wasn’t purposeful. It wasn’t calculated.” His voice dropped huskily. “I simply wanted you.”

  Heat flooded Cassandra at his words, so raw and simple. She let out a shaky breath.

  “I didn’t try to lure you into anything. I simply could not keep my hands off you.” His gaze flickered down over her body; then he looked back up at her face, eyes bright with lust. “I still can’t, God help me.”

  He leaned forward then, his hand coming up to the back of her neck, and bent to kiss her.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  HER MOUTH OPENED naturally to him, and her hands came up to cup his face. The very feel of his skin beneath her fingertips made her tremble: the warmth, the texture, the underlying hardness of his cheekbones and jaw. There was nothing else except this moment, this kiss, his arms around her. Their lips clung together, tongues intertwining fervently.

  He broke off their kiss only to pick her up and lift her onto his lap, his arm going around her back to support her, and then his mouth found hers again. His free hand roamed her body, caressing her breasts through her clothes and moving down her stomach and over her hips and legs, then gliding back up to cup her breast. Cassandra’s skin was fiery everywhere he touched her, and she arched up against his hand, moaning, as he repeated the caresses. He groaned deep in his throat at her unconscious gesture of passion, and his lips dug harder into hers. Cassandra felt as though he might swallow her whole, as if her body were no longer her own but a wild thing that responded only to him. Strangely, the feeling was not frightening, but exciting, as if she were entering a world she had never known.

  He unbuttoned her bodice, his fingers clumsy with haste and desire, and slipped his hand beneath the cloth, delving down beneath bodice and chemise to caress the soft orb of her breast. He pulled his mouth away, raining kisses across her face to her ear. Gently he took her earlobe between his teeth and began to worry it, and at the same moment his finger and thumb teased at her nipple. Desire slammed down through Cassandra and exploded in her abdomen. He continued to play with her nipple, rubbing and gently squeezing and pulling, until it was a hard, tight bud, and with every movement, moisture pooled hotly between her legs. Cassandra moved her hips unconsciously; she could hear her own panting breath, fast and loud.

  “Cassandra…” he breathed, kissing his way down her soft white throat. His lips were searing, and his breath tickled her flesh, setting still more sensations spinning through her. She could feel the hardness of his masculinity pressing against her bottom, pulsing with desire. A hot ache grew between her legs, threatening to overwhelm her, and she squeezed her legs tightly together to try to ease it.

  In answer, his hand went beneath her skirts and up her leg, gliding over her thigh, nothing between their flesh but the thin cotton of her undergarments. Then, shockingly, his hand was between her legs, pressing against the hot center of her ache. She knew he could feel the wetness and the heat of her, and it embarrassed her, but the shame was swept away under the intense pleasure of his touch. It was exactly what she had been inchoately longing for, and she whimpered at the fiery sensation.

  His mouth continued its journey down her chest, and he nuzzled aside the bodice and chemise. His mouth fastened on her nipple. Cassandra drew a startled breath, amazed that the pleasure she was feeling could intensify. He suckled her nipple, surrounding it with heat and wetness, every pull of his mouth sizzling as if along a cord straight down into her abdomen. At the same time his hand pressed against the gate of her femininity, stroking in time to the pull of his mouth, and Cassandra trembled under the double force of delight. She was adrift and confused, wanting him to go on forever, yet feeling as if she might explode and fly apart as the pleasure escalated.

  Her hands caressed his back and shoulders, and she realized that she wanted very much to feel his bare flesh beneath her hands, to touch him as he had touched her, to explore his neck and chest with her mouth. Her hand went to the nape of his neck, caressing the skin there, and he jerked and groaned at her touch. She breathed his name.

  The horse whinnied and stamped its feet, moving restively, and Philip and Cassandra froze, the world around them suddenly intruding on their passion.

  “Oh, God,” Philip groaned, laying his head against her chest and drawing in deep breaths. Reluctantly he drew his hand away from her legs and straightened. His eyes were ferally blazing, his face flushed and slack with desire. “Anyone could see us.”

  He glanced around them at the road and the meadow beyond. “Christ, what was I thinking?” He let out a short laugh. “Obviously I was not thinking at all.”

  Cassandra sat up shakily, sliding off his lap and back onto the seat beside him. Her face flamed with embarrassment as she thought of how exposed they had been to the passing world, and she began to button up her bodice with trembling fingers. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have…”

  “No,” he answered hoarsely. “’Twas not your fault. It was mine. Here I was, taking you to task for thinking me a seducer, and then I fall on you like a ravening animal.” He sighed and ran his hands over his face, hard, as if he could wipe out the passion still raging within him. “I seem to have no control around you.”

  “I am the same with you,” Cassandra admitted honestly, and her words sent a fresh wave of heat through Philip.

  “Lord, Cassandra.” He let out a shaky little laugh. “How do you expect a man to exercise willpower when you say things like that?”

  “Philip…is what we did so very wrong?” Cassandra asked, her eyes fixed on her fingers as they pleated and repleated a piece of her skirt.

  “Wrong? No! I do not think it is wrong. Only a very inconvenient place and time. I think what I want to do with you is very right. But the world,” he noted, “does not look upon it quite so tolerantly, I’m afraid.”

  “No. That is very true.”

  Cassandra continued to frown down at her lap. Philip took her chin in his hand and turned her face up to his. “Cassandra, I would never want to hurt you in any way, to make you feel unhappy or to damage you in the eyes of the world. I will not lie to you. I want you more than I have ever wanted any woman. But the decision must be yours. I refuse to persuade or seduce you. I will not take advantage of you.”

  She smiled at him, a golden glow of a smile that pierced his heart. “I was so wrong to think what I did of you. You are a good man.”

  He smiled back crookedly. “There are many who would dispute that. But I am well satisfied if you think so.” He kissed her lightly on the lips, then released her chin and turned away, gathering up the reins. “Now, let us talk of other things, so that we can arrive home with some semblance of dignity.”

  * * *

  CASSANDRA WORE THE new gown that Lady Neville had given her yesterday to supper that evening, and she reveled in the way Philip’s eyes lit up when he saw her. Olivia and Georgette had helped her with her hair, styling it in a softer way so that it framed her face beautifully. Violet beamed when she saw her, and Lady Neville gave her a short nod of approval. Cassandra even had the satisfaction of seeing her cousin and aunt staring at her as if they could not believe she was the person they knew.

  Later,
as they sat in the drawing room after supper, Philip leaned over and murmured, “You test a man’s control sorely in that dress, Miss Verrere.”

  Cassandra chuckled throatily and threw him a sparkling glance. “Indeed, sir, I believe that is the idea.”

  She realized with some astonishment that she was actually flirting with a man.

  During the next few days Cassandra and Philip worked steadily in the library, explaining to their rather curious relatives that Cassandra was helping Sir Philip catalogue the Neville books. To Cassandra’s amazement, the search was no longer dull or tedious. With the strain of her doubts about Philip gone, they worked side by side, talking as they went. Sometimes the children helped them, but more often not the lure of future treasure was not enough to prevail over the pleasures of the outdoors, of games and horseback riding.

  In the afternoon Cassandra and Philip usually broke off their work for a ride. Though Cassandra protested at first at the time lost, she had to admit that a brisk ride blew away many of the cobwebs that accumulated in her brain during the slow, methodical search. Joanna often managed to find a way to insinuate herself into their riding party, but Cassandra soon found that Sir Philip grew quite adept at avoiding her annoying cousin.

  They rode sometimes beside the Ouse and sometimes along twisting, tree-shaded country lanes, through meadows and woods. But their most frequent journeys took them to the ruins of an old abbey.

  Cassandra gasped with delight the first time that Philip took her there. It lay beside a twisting, tree-lined brook, a romantic ruin of gray stone, only one small part of it still standing, the rest of the walls in varying stages of decay. Grass had started growing between the paving stones, and vines had taken over some of the tumbled-down walls. It looked mysterious and ancient, a place of secrecy, yet of peace and beauty, as well.