by Erica Ridley
“I’m not sure I deserve it now,” he confessed.
“You probably don’t,” she agreed. “I’ll check on the biscuits anyway.”
She pulled the tray from the oven just as the last few grains of sand slipped down the neck of the hourglass.
Daniel’s mouth watered. The biscuits looked divine. Perfectly round, perfectly golden, with an aroma so cinnamon-sweet the very air tasted like sugar. He reached for the one closest to him.
Rebecca smacked his hand. “Not yet, goose. You’ll burn your fingers. Give the biscuits a few minutes to set.”
Properly chastised, he returned his hands to his lap. “Thank you. I mean it.”
She lifted a narrow shoulder. “They’re just biscuits.”
He shook his head. “Nothing is ever just biscuits.”
She blinked. “What does that mean?”
“I…have no idea. It sounded deep until I said it.” He reached forward and took her hands. “Rebecca, believe me. I never meant to hurt you. When I was awful to you outside that ballroom when we were children, it was because we were children. I don’t know if you know this, but seventeen-year-old boys are incredibly stupid. Me, more than most.”
She arched a brow in silence.
At least she hadn’t slapped him. That was encouraging.
He took a deep breath. “I was dying to impress you. But I wanted to impress my grandmother even more. My father had never been good enough for her. Then he died, and I became heir. To this day, I have never lived up to her standards. Back then, I was still young enough and scared enough to want to try. You never deserved to be caught in the crossfire.”
“You’re right,” she said quietly. Her voice shook. “I didn’t.”
“Nor did I mean to hurt you during your come-out Season in London.” He stroked the back of her hand, his chest tight. He had to make her see. “Twenty-one-year-old lads are marginally more intelligent than their seventeen-year-old counterparts, but I happened to inherit a viscountcy in the meantime.”
She gazed back at him flatly. Her eyes were luminous with suppressed pain.
He forced himself to continue. “Not only was I trying to live up to my grandmother’s impossible standards, I was now under the magnifying glass of the entire ton. Anything I said, anywhere I went, every little detail appeared in the society papers. Now that I’m older, I no longer care what the caricaturists and society matrons think of me—”
“Obviously,” Rebecca muttered.
“—but from the start, I desperately wanted to make a positive difference in the House of Lords. And I knew nothing. About anything. I spent every day immersed in the estate and taking care of my tenants, and every night researching every topic that came up in Parliament. When you arrived, I couldn’t afford a distraction… and you had always been my greatest weakness.”
Her expression was skeptical at best.
He tried again. “I can’t claim I didn’t mean to ignore you, because I did so on purpose. Not because of anything against you, but because I knew one tea, one dance, one moment in your company and I would never be able to be anywhere else.”
Her eyes narrowed. She was no doubt having difficulty reconciling this explanation with how it had looked and felt at the time.
He couldn’t blame her for distrusting him.
“I did it for my own self-preservation, even though I knew I was hurting you in the process.” There. That was honest. But now that she knew the truth, he knew no excuse would suffice. “I recognize that I behaved like a blackguard. And I am truly, truly sorry.”
She pulled her hands from his grasp. “I was young. You were young. That was then. Very well, I forgive you for telling me I ‘wasn’t significant enough’ to bother dancing with… right in earshot of your grandmother and all the other guests.”
His neck flushed in shame. He hadn’t considered how devastating those careless words might have been on her reputation and her chance in Society.
Her eyes flashed. “I even understand the pull of wanting to fit in with the ton, and the pressure of suddenly having to run a viscountcy and vote responsibly because England’s future depends on it. That’s not what still stings.”
He tensed in trepidation. How much worse had he harmed her?
“What hurt me for so long weren’t your little snubs, but that you could forget me so completely.”
His head shot up. “I swear I never—”
She lifted a trembling hand. “Don’t. Your life was hard. Things obviously got better. The viscountcy was solvent. You were elected to committees. Your name began to appear next to words like ‘flirt’ and ‘rake’ and ‘masquerade’ in all the society papers.”
He winced. All that was true. Once he’d got used to his new role, it had become easier to just keep playing it.
Her eyes betrayed her disgust…and her pain. “Clearly things had finally settled down and you now had more time and money on your hands than you knew what to do with. Yet you never so much as penned a single letter. Not one sorry word.”
His stomach twisted. He had been a coward. And he had hurt her more than he’d ever known. His throat grew thick.
She rose to her feet. The chasm between them yawned even wider. “Years passed, Daniel. I never heard your name unless I read it in a newspaper. Yet you expect me to believe I’m the one you never forgot?”
“I wanted to write to you,” he burst out as he pushed to his feet. “I was terrified to. I knew it wouldn’t be enough. After everything that had happened, everything I’d put you through… What use was a letter? You would have torn it up, burned it, and I would have deserved nothing less. I needed to come in person. It was the only way. The best way.”
“Then why didn’t you?” Her voice cracked. “Years, Daniel.”
His heart sank. He hated himself for causing her so much pain. “I had waited so long and had so many excuses. The viscountcy, the House of Lords, the weather. What I really feared was that you couldn’t forgive me. That you never would. And as long as I didn’t try, as long as I didn’t ask, I could let myself believe there was still a chance for us to be friends again someday.”
“Is that what you want?” she demanded, her eyes flashing. A humorless smile twisted her perfect lips. “To be friends?”
“No,” he said as he cupped her face in his hands and tilted her mouth up to his. “I’ve never wanted that. I’ll prove it.”
He crushed his lips to hers and kissed her with all the passion he’d kept bottled up for so long. He kissed her for the green lad he’d been nine years ago, when they’d shared the first kiss of their lives with each other, right there in the same kitchen, with the scent of fresh-baked biscuits in the air.
He kissed her for the scared turnip he’d still been four years ago, who had been drowning from the pressure of trying to be a perfect viscount and dying to be a credible representative and secretly wanting nothing more than to run away from it all with a pretty dark-eyed girl with glossy black ringlets.
Most of all, he kissed her for her. For always being true to herself. For being the smartest person he knew. The bravest. The strongest. Whenever he asked himself what kind of man he wanted to be, the answer wasn’t to become his grandmother’s puppet, or to mold himself after some duke or legislator.
He wanted to be good enough for Rebecca. He wanted to be wise and brave and strong. He wanted to be the kind of man she deserved. A man she could be proud of.
But he wasn’t. He never had been.
“You’re everything I want,” he rasped as he ripped his mouth from hers. “But we both know I can’t have you.”
Chapter 10
I
f Daniel hadn’t spent the entire night unable to sleep, he might not have been standing at his window at sunrise in time to see a small familiar figure steal through the garden and wend her way across the drawbridge.
Rebecca. Leaving the castle.
Alone.
There was no time to wake his valet. Daniel paused only to tug on breec
hes, a linen shirt, and his greatcoat before racing out of the guest quarters and across the front garden to the top of the drawbridge, where he’d last caught sight of her.
Heart pounding, he scanned the horizon. That women should never venture out unaccompanied wasn’t just some namby-pamby rule to guard fashionable ladies’ reputations. It helped protect the fairer sex from being set upon by thieves, or worse. And out here on the abandoned Cornish cliffs, where smugglers were known to row ashore… She could be in real danger.
A flash of black hair and white pelisse against the infinite blue of ocean and sky. There. That was Rebecca, striding off the walking path to the village and angling instead toward the cliffs and the caves in the distance.
He ran.
Daniel had no clue what the blasted woman was up to—he didn’t even know what the devil he was about—but the last thing he wanted was for any harm to come to Rebecca. He would never forgive himself.
By the time he reached the cliffs at the edge of the sea, she had vanished from the horizon. His boots knocked a cloud of dust into the nothingness as he swayed unsteadily to keep from sliding over. Vertigo assailed him as he searched for any sign of her on the rocks below.
A flash of white disappeared into a yawning black crevice amongst the rocky outcroppings of the unforgiving cliff.
Bloody hell. His hands went clammy. Daniel hated dangling from perilous heights over the ocean almost as much as he hated passing the night with restless spirits in a haunted castle.
He dropped to his knees and eased the toes of his Hessians down the cliff face until they found purchase on a slender ledge no wider than his palm. Bits of rock crumbled away from the weight of his body as he edged his way down until there were no more toeholds. His tight muscles began to tremble from the strain of holding on.
To reach the next flat grouping wide enough to walk upon with a slightly lower probability of breaking his neck in the process, he was going to have to release his death grip on the edge of the dusty cliff above, drop another six or eight feet straight down… and hope to land on jagged rock, rather than tumble into the depths of the sea.
Brilliant.
With a final, pleading glance up at the heavens, he kicked back from the ledge and released his fingers.
Salty air rushed past his ears before his boots landed hard on the rocks below, jarring his shaky knees and causing him to flail for balance.
Once his panicked heart slowed to a slightly less apoplectic pace, he picked his way to the crevice he’d glimpsed from above and slipped inside.
Darkness surrounded him.
Light from the fissure was quickly extinguished by shadow as the cave twisted and sloped its way toward the sea. There was no sign of Rebecca. No sign of anyone. He pressed onward.
Just when he thought the pitching turns in relentless blackness would never end, a blinding light filled the cave and dazzled his eyes.
He squinted to regain his swimming vision. The world blurred, then came into focus. His lips parted in stunned disbelief.
An opening. The treacherous path had led to a fairy-tale opening the size of a portico. On the other side was a pristine stretch of placid, white sand beach. The gentle lull of frothy ocean ripples washing ashore was the only sound to break the tranquil silence.
He was certain not a single soul had ever set foot on this portrait-perfect, inaccessible beach in a forgotten stretch of virgin land. Except for Rebecca.
And now…him.
He cleared his throat as he stepped out of the cave. “Fancy meeting you on this… godforsaken path that only a madwoman with no care for her life at all would dare be foolish enough to take.”
She spun around, mouth falling open. “Daniel?”
“I told you London bucks often get lost in the country.” He cupped a hand to his eyes. “Is this the way to the apothecary?”
She burst out laughing. “Are you ill?”
“I must be. I just climbed down the face of a cliff and through a pitch-black cave because I thought you might require protecting.” His limbs still shuddered. “As it turns out, I shall require you to carry me back up.”
Her eyes twinkled. “Fortunately for you, there’s a slightly more viscount-friendly route on the other side of the beach. If you are a gentleman, I may show you how to find it.”
“I shall worship at your feet,” he promised fervently.
She gazed back at him with pursed lips. Probably because the last time they’d spoken, he’d finally spoken aloud what they had both always known to be true: they could never be more than friends.
Even that much might be out of their reach.
No matter how much he might wish otherwise, their worlds were too different. They were too different. Rebecca would find London a living hell. And he could not be away from his responsibilities for much longer.
Stolen moments could not last forever.
He rubbed the back of his neck. “What are you doing out here?”
“This isn’t just the prettiest beach in Delmouth… it’s the most private. Only I know the path.” She gestured toward a small linen towel left at a safe distance from the lapping waves. “Since I know I won’t be disturbed, I like to come here to swim.”
Daniel clenched his jaw at the irony. Of course. He hadn’t been protecting her after all. He was invading her secluded sanctum.
“My apologies,” he said quietly. “I had no desire to disturb your privacy. If you’ll point me in the direction of the path back to the village, I will leave you to your bath.”
“Path…is putting it rather strongly,” she admitted. “The route is traversable, but unmarked. If I don’t accompany you, you’re just as likely to wander into a smuggler’s den as you are to find the village.”
Marvelous. He wasn’t only interrupting her solitude. He had become a liability. So much for his gallant rescue.
“Well…you’re here,” she said. “Whether you meant to be or not.”
He lifted his palms in apology.
“And I’m here,” she continued. “Desperately in need of a distraction… or at least a bit of exercise.”
Hope fluttered in his belly. Perhaps he hadn’t pushed her further away after all.
With a sigh, she peeled off her pelisse and dropped it onto the sand, revealing a long flannel bathing dress beneath. “Fancy a swim, Daniel?”
He had never removed a greatcoat faster in his life. “Absolutely.”
She raced him to the shore.
The water was bollocks-shrinking cold, but he quickly forgot about the temperature in the joy of splashing around with Rebecca. She was a strong swimmer, even with lead weights for modesty sewn in the seams of her bathing dress, and she led him on a merry chase through the turquoise-blue sea before they finally swam back to the shore in exhaustion.
To say that the sight of her bathing dress clinging to every curve of her body managed to obliterate Daniel’s fatigue would be a gross understatement. But her teeth were chattering in the chill October wind, and as much as Daniel would have liked to personally be the one to heat her in his embrace, the only shelter from the cold were the jagged walls of the narrow cave.
More importantly, Rebecca deserved far more than a thoughtless tup at the base of a cliff. She deserved a future. A husband. Someone who cherished her as deeply as Daniel did.
As he helped ease Rebecca’s trembling arms back into the warmth of her pelisse, he couldn’t help but acknowledge how much Delmouth meant to her. Now, more than ever, he realized her life was here. She wasn’t some missish chit who swooned in ballrooms or spent weeks debating which color of feather would best suit her bonnet.
Rebecca was wide open spaces. Secret paths down soaring cliffs. Jaw-dropping views. Clever labyrinths. Sunrise strolls. The majestic sea.
She was a vivid wildflower amid an ocean of identical roses. Her fearlessness and unpredictable nature were what he appreciated about her the most. He loved her too much to want to change her… or try to tame her.
She
smiled up at him through dark lashes as they hiked side-by-side up a winding trail. “I’m glad you were here today,” she admitted softly. “This is my favorite place. After you leave, we’ll still have that memory.”
He stumbled. The last thing he was thinking about was leaving. He’d just realized he was in love with her, damn it. And she was already moving on.
Daniel looked away. She was wise to carry on without him.
Soon, he would have to do the same.
Chapter 11
R
ebecca stood in the center of the artfully crumbling folly. Her stomach twisted. Grieving, she stared out through the six fluted columns at the hedge maze she’d designed.
The rest of the guests were either in Banfield’s study for the reading of the bequests, or off in one of the front parlors, partaking of the late earl’s port. Rebecca was alone in the middle of her labyrinth for perhaps one of the final times.
Soon, she would have to leave Crowmere Castle for good.
She tried to tamp down a sudden wave of panic. There was only one way out. She had to find a country gentleman to wed, and quickly. If she allowed the new earl to select a husband for her, she could end up with a dullard or a brute. Either way, she’d spend the rest of her life trapped in some dismal clump of townhouses beneath London’s thick, coal-stained sky.
Clenching her fingers with determination, she hurried down the stone steps of the folly and back through the labyrinth toward the castle. By the time she returned, the will reading would have concluded, and most of the guests would be readying for their departure.
It was past time for her to do the same.
Rebecca exited the maze near the outbuilding housing the wine cellar and slipped inside the castle via the rear door. She would don her best gown, such as it was, and take a moment or two to curl her hair, and then she’d drag the first available maid into Delmouth in search of a husband she could actually live with.