by Mia Vincy
He gulped and was spluttering, “It was a jest, I mean, my lord,” when Arabella drifted over to them.
“You are looking decidedly warm, Sir Walter. Perhaps you ought not stand so close to the fire.” She turned to Guy. “Are you two enjoying your conversation?”
“Not really,” Guy said, although in truth he was enjoying himself immensely. “I am debating whether or not to shoot Sir Walter.”
That man emitted a squeaky laugh. “His lordship jests.”
“I should hope so,” Arabella said. “It’s terribly inconvenient when guests shoot each other, plays havoc with the seating arrangements. It would be especially unsporting with Sir Walter’s son arriving next week. Which day will the much-acclaimed Mr. Humphrey Treadgold be joining us, Sir Walter?”
Sir Walter’s brow accumulated a few more beads of sweat. “I’m afraid our Humphrey has been unavoidably detained.”
“What a shame,” Arabella said serenely. “I was so looking forward to meeting him. Weren’t you, Hardbury?”
“Very much.”
Their eyes met. Again, Guy felt that sense of understanding.
“I do feel a trifle warm,” Sir Walter said. “If you’ll excuse me, my lord, Miss Larke.”
As Sir Walter scuttled across the room, Arabella flicked a glance to the door. Guy caught her meaning, and together they casually drifted out into the deserted hallway.
“He knows the marriage license is gone but he means to brazen it out,” Guy said, standing close and speaking softly, though no one was there to overhear.
“Yet they have given Mama no indication that they intend to leave.”
“And he was in a very jovial mood. Until we ruined it.”
“Suspicious, isn’t it?” A smile danced in Arabella’s eyes. “No one who is that cheerful can possibly be up to any good.”
“I say, you make a useful sort of ally,” Guy said. “I like having you on my side.”
She opened her mouth to reply, when Miss Bell slipped out of the drawing room into the hallway.
“I’m glad I caught you two alone,” Miss Bell said. “At dinner, Sir Walter was insisting there is something odd about your engagement and that his lordship actually means to marry Miss Treadgold. It might be nothing, but Cassandra and I thought you should know.”
“Thank you, Juno,” Arabella said, exchanging a look with Guy. “Sir Walter appears to be scheming something, but it remains to be seen what.”
Miss Bell’s eyes darted back and forth between the two of them. Then, with a mischievous smile, she said, “Carry on,” and skipped back into the drawing room, blonde ringlets bouncing.
“Well, well, well,” Guy said, once they were alone again. “We shall have to improve our game, if Sir Walter is running around saying our engagement isn’t real.”
“It isn’t real,” Arabella murmured.
“But he mustn’t know that.”
She stood against the wall, head high, back straight, as flawlessly elegant as ever, the rose silk-net of her gown drawing out the soft pink in her complexion.
Quick glances confirmed they had no witnesses. He edged closer to her.
“Guy. What are you doing?”
“Circumstances demand that I kiss you. Stop being obtuse.”
“Someone could see.”
“My point exactly.” He traced the embroidered flowers, sliding his finger along the edge of her bodice. “After all, if we were to kiss, no one would doubt our commitment.”
It would be a mistake to kiss her again, especially here and now, but Guy could not step back. Perhaps Arabella would be sensible and stop this—but she only cast a glance down the empty hallway, before straightening his lapel.
“I suppose that does make sense,” she said slowly.
“Very rational, I thought.”
“It’s important to be rational about these matters.”
“I’ve always thought so.”
“So I expect this to be a rational kiss,” she said.
“It will be the most rational kiss in the world.”
He trailed his wayward hand up her throat to cup her cheek, and her fingers fluttered onto his jaw. As she closed her eyes, he breathed in her scent, basked in her warmth, and touched his lips to hers, in a lingering caress, potent with promise. It reminded him of their very first kiss in London. Everything had been wrong that night, but this, now, felt as if they were finally getting it right.
When he lifted his head, his eyes searched hers, though he could not have said what he sought.
“Well?” he asked.
Her tongue darted out to touch her lips, and she swallowed visibly. “Well what?”
“How does that compare to the other kisses?”
“I…” Her eyes shifted past him, widened slightly. Damn. They had developed a witness. A servant, no doubt, who would be smart enough to vanish like smoke. But that servant’s presence was enough to make Arabella retreat into her usual poise.
“Of all the kisses I have ever received…”
“Yes?” he prompted, not turning.
“That was the most…”
“Yes?”
“Recent.”
Guy chuckled. “For someone who claims not to know how to flirt, you are very good at it.” He brushed a knuckle against her throat. “I’d like to point out that your pulse is racing.”
“And I’d like to point out that my mother is watching.”
“Ah.”
Her eyes danced with laughter. Fighting his own smile, Guy backed away from her and turned to face the intruder. Lady Belinda stood with her hands clasped, chastening him with her serene, direct gaze.
He bowed. “Lady Belinda.”
“Lord Hardbury.”
He pivoted and strode away. The door to the drawing room gaped open, but his senses still burned with Arabella’s closeness, so he kept on walking, seeking the respite and release of his room.
Chapter 17
“Oh, what a work of art!”
Juno’s voice was threaded with awe, and she burst into activity, swiftly moving her charcoal across a leaf of paper.
Arabella did not need to look at that page to know what Juno was drawing.
Or whom, rather.
Arabella, Juno, and Cassandra had rounded a corner of the abbey ruins just in time to see Guy leap onto a four-foot-high crumbling wall, in a single bound like a cat. He paused, swaying in the sunlight, finding his balance, his face bright with simple, boyish fun. He was picturesquely framed by a high, distant arch, and a cluster of purple Michaelmas daisies rioted at his feet.
One gave Michaelmas daisies to say farewell.
“Beware distractions, Juno,” Arabella managed to say, though she might as well have been warning herself. That morning, she had thrown herself into organizing an impromptu outing for the small party of remaining guests in a vain effort to keep her mind off that oh-so-irrational kiss of the evening before. “Perhaps you had forgotten that your assignment today is to draw the abbey ruins.”
“I am drawing the ruins.” Juno’s swift, confident strokes did not pause, as Guy’s image appeared under her hand. “I just happen to be drawing that portion of the ruins that have an athletic man prancing about on them. I would just as likely draw a bird or a cat had one landed on that spot, but since Lord Hardbury has been so obliging as to make a spectacle of himself, well, who am I to ignore Nature’s bounty? These beauteous forms…” She glanced sideways at Arabella. “Poetry. Sorry.”
“So you should be.”
Guy was moving nimbly along the wall now, testing the stone, choosing his next move. A sky lark landed on a high wall nearby and he paused to admire it.
Breathtaking.
Good grief. More wretched poetry, and a nonsensical phrase to boot, but how else to describe this tightness in her chest? This bittersweet ache, as if all her breath had indeed been stolen, leaving her limbs light with a desperate need for air.
He could have been mine.
The thought jolted throug
h her, with a sensation as physical as if she were falling.
A life with Guy could have been hers. A potentially beautiful gift had been bestowed upon her, but she had failed to see its worth, amidst her struggle to understand and control her own life. This breathtaking man and the life of joy he seemed to promise—they were as far out of her reach as that sky lark, and that was nobody’s fault but her own.
If she had gone about life differently? Become the amiable lady her father demanded, the lady of Guy’s dreams, less complicated, less combative, less herself?
But she didn’t want to be different. She didn’t want to change herself to please others. What she wanted was—oh, heaven help her, she was turning into a ninny!—but she wanted to be special to him. In truth, and not as a game.
“I wish I could do that,” came a voice from her side.
It was Freddie, watching Guy wistfully, her fingers absently tearing a Michaelmas daisy to shreds. Glancing around, Arabella saw that she had unconsciously drifted nearer to Guy, leaving Juno and Cassandra behind.
“Climb the walls,” Freddie clarified. “We went to see some acrobats and I’ve been practicing at home. I can leap and pivot mid-air, and even do somersaults and land safely.”
“If you had thought to wear your Turkish trousers today, you could have impressed us all.”
With a sigh, Freddie flicked away the dregs of destroyed daisy. “Lady Treadgold found them before I finished sewing them and took them away.”
“You ought to take them back again.” At Arabella’s meaningfully raised brows, Freddie’s expression brightened. “I’ll speak to Holly about arranging that. And if you can spare a few coins, I daresay Holly can find a maid willing to finish sewing them somewhere Lady Treadgold cannot see.”
A grin spread over Freddie’s face as they turned back to study the walls. Guy leaped across a gap and landed effortlessly. How lovely it would be to take an action with such easy confidence and without first having to consider the forty-seven different ways it might be done. How lovely if she had the right to explore his body again. How lovely if he searched for her, smiled at her, acknowledged her as special to him.
“It’s like doing a puzzle, choosing where to put one’s feet, calculating the leap,” Freddie said. “But it’s better than a puzzle, because one’s whole body is involved, and the risk of falling makes it more fun.”
“That’s the kind of thing Guy says,” Arabella pointed out. “The two of you are very similar, you know.”
Freddie didn’t respond, behaving as if she wasn’t listening. Arabella suspected Freddie heard everything and only pretended not to.
“You would know that about Guy if you spent more time with him, instead of riding off alone,” Arabella added. “And he wants to spend more time with you.”
Freddie shrugged. “What’s the point? I’ll hardly see him.”
“He’ll make time for you. He is trying to win custody.”
“He’s only trying to defeat Father. He doesn’t really care.”
“But he does. It matters to him, Freddie. Truly. For so many years, he has been horribly alone.” She sought the words, needing Freddie to understand, needing to give Guy this one gift: the happiness he sought from family. “He’s all heart, you know. Heart and muscle. He believes in things. He believes in them so fully he doesn’t have to think about them first. He already knows what to do.”
Her eyes followed him as he trod the wall. He would never be hers. How long would she be haunted by this strange nostalgia for a future she could never have?
She turned back to Freddie. “He believes in you like that. In family, in looking after other people. He’ll fight for you, with all his heart and muscle. He’ll fight for you to be happy.”
Freddie was looking at her oddly. “He doesn’t know what makes me happy.”
“Then tell him.”
What a hypocrite she was! Easy advice, when she had no idea how to speak her own truths to Guy, when she wasn’t even sure what they were. But if only she could touch him, as he had touched her last night, and then…
Seduce him. There was an idea. Would it be such a terrible thing to do? In less than a week, he would be gone, and they both understood the rules of honor no longer applied; he would feel no obligation to her, and she would feel no shame. A passing pleasure. A souvenir. To let herself pretend that he was hers, if only for one more hour. Of course, if he rejected her, that would be terrible.
Freddie beheaded another hapless daisy and set about shredding this one too. “I told him I don’t want to marry, but he just said of course I want to marry, but that I could choose to whom.”
Arabella considered. “You’re wealthy enough not to marry if you don’t want to, but you don’t have to decide yet. Married women have more freedom, and you might yet find a man you like. You said no one has even tried to court you.”
“It wasn’t that great.”
Arabella looked at her sharply. “Who was it?”
“Who was what?”
“Who courted you?”
“No one. It’s nothing. I’m fairly sure I don’t want to marry.”
Guy bounded off the wall, landing easily on the grass and exchanging a friendly word with one of the other men.
“You know yourself best,” Arabella said to Freddie, as Guy rounded the wall and disappeared from view. “Only… Don’t be so sure that you miss a wonderful opportunity, or say the wrong thing at the wrong time, and ruin something that might have been precious.”
Guy was not entirely sure how he came to be traipsing down the worn, uneven stone steps into the abbey crypt, with a lantern held aloft and four ladies in his wake.
“I do hope there are no ghosts!” he heard Miss Treadgold call from somewhere further up the stairs, her voice tremulous.
“If there are, they are very friendly,” came the amiable assurance of Mrs. DeWitt, who carried the other lantern. Guy had met her husband in London, a magnetically energetic man who had deftly managed to offend everyone in the room. Odd pair, Mr. and Mrs. DeWitt. No wonder they lived apart.
“We are safe with Lord Hardbury to protect us,” Miss Bell chimed in. “His lordship will not hesitate to battle the dead should they decide to rise from their graves.”
“Not sure that’s helping,” Guy muttered.
Immediately behind him, Arabella laughed softly, and Guy resisted the urge to twist around and share in that laughter. He had vowed to ignore her today, to stop his foolish, flirtatious games, but still he always seemed to know where she was. He was helplessly aware of her presence, as if she had become some kind of necessary function, the way one knew that one’s heart was beating or that one’s stomach required food.
This infatuation will pass, he had told himself. This game will end, he had said.
Well, the infatuation hadn’t passed, and the game did not feel like a game anymore.
“You have nothing to fear, Miss Treadgold,” Arabella called. “The dead are more frightened of us than we are of them. Are you still with us?”
“Oh yes, I am determined to be brave.”
“Your courage is admirable.”
At the last few stairs, the air grew noticeably colder and the smell of ancient stone washed over him. Guy held the lantern higher as they filed into the dark cavern, the light outlining the sarcophagi and statues of the women whose bones lay within. Guy’s boots echoed on the stone floor as he wandered into the darkness, sensing Arabella’s presence beside him. Mrs. DeWitt headed in the other direction, leading the other two under the arches, their heads swathed in the lantern’s glow, every footstep, murmur, and rustle of fabric amplified.
“Are you frightened?” he murmured to Arabella. “Will you faint? Shall I hold your hand?”
“I assure you, I am quite all right.”
“But I am not. If you don’t hold my hand, I shall swoon with fear, and you’ll have to carry me out.”
“Nonsense. I would have no qualms about leaving you here.”
So Guy d
id the obvious thing: He shut the flap on the lantern, sinking their part of the crypt into darkness. A glow revealed the location of the others.
“You cannot be serious,” Arabella said.
He laughed softly, and remembered too late he had vowed to stop these games. But neither could he move. In the darkness, robbed of sight, all his other senses sharpened with awareness of Arabella. He knew when she breathed, when she shifted, when she drew ever so slightly closer.
Something touched his neck. Warm fingers, teasing the hair at his nape. Heat shivered down his spine. A strangled sound escaped him.
“Oh! What was that noise?” came Miss Treadgold’s cry.
The lantern glow showed the others moving back toward them. Arabella shifted again. Her hand landed on his stomach. Inched downward. Oh, so help him, she was going to master him at his own game!
Now her fingers nudged his waistband. He emitted another strangled sound; she responded with a muffled laugh.
“Was that a ghost?” whimpered Miss Treadgold. “Oh, there are dead people everywhere!”
In the dim light of the other lantern, Guy could make out the shape of Miss Treadgold, hugging herself, eyes fixed on a statue of a long-dead abbess.
Arabella’s hand disappeared. Guy opened his lantern to increase the light.
“Miss Treadgold, are you all right?” Mrs. DeWitt asked. “It can be a bit overwhelming, can’t it? We’re all used to it, as we played here as children.”
“If you are frightened, we can go back upstairs,” Arabella said.
Miss Treadgold didn’t move. “All those bones…”
“Stars above, she’s frozen with fear,” Guy muttered.
He lunged across the space toward her, took her elbow, and guided her up the stairs. Absently, he murmured encouraging words but his mind was on Arabella, teasing him in the dark, taking her playful revenge for his games under the table the night before.
Back in the sunlight, he handed off the lantern to a footman and turned back to Miss Treadgold, who, it turned out, was neither pale nor trembling.
“You must think me silly,” she said with a pretty smile.