by Sophia James
Daniel was a stranger to her, all the pieces of his past unknown and the sum of his whole unchartered. The cold thought clawed into consciousness but she shook such a musing away, colouring as she realised her guests were looking at her as though expecting an answer to a question.
‘I am sorry, I did not hear what you asked.’
‘Lucien wished to know if you would allow his younger sister to help you get ready on your wedding day.’
‘Oh.’ Amethyst did not quite know how to answer this. She had always been surrounded by men in the business of trading timber and had seldom had the time to foster any relationship with women.
The Earl of Ross took up the conversation now. ‘Christine lost her betrothed in the march up to La Corunna and she is a little depressed. Helping in the preparation for a wedding might be just the distraction she needs.’
‘I should imagine your sister would find me most dull.’
‘She loves hairstyles and dresses and decorating homes.’
Amethyst’s heart sank.
‘And she can make an occasion of anything.’
Hard to make an occasion with the two participants pressed into a union neither wished for. Placing a false smile on her lips, Amethyst nodded.
‘Then I would be most thankful for her help.’
Montcliffe appeared as though he was about to laugh, but the arrival of the maid with an assortment of small cakes and lemonade put paid to that expression. Pouring three generous glasses, she handed one to each of them and invited them to sit down.
‘The speciality of the house is this lemon syrup. I hope you will enjoy it.’ The lemonade was cold and sour, exactly the way she and her father liked it, yet both men looked to be struggling with the taste. Even yesterday she might have been mortified to think that the beverage was not quite right, but today for some reason the fact made her smile.
The control she seldom lost hold of had seemed to slip of late and the small victory was welcomed. She knew, of course, that they would be far more at home with some alcoholic drink, but it was only just midday and the hour seemed too early to be serving something as strong without Papa present.
When Lord Montcliffe stood she was certain that he would be taking his leave, but he walked across to the window instead to observe a view of the park opposite.
‘This house is well situated. Do you take exercise there?’
‘Sometimes I do, my lord. More normally though I ride my horse in Hyde Park in the late afternoon.’
‘Will you be there tomorrow?’
He had not turned, but she felt a palpable tension as he waited for her answer.
‘I shall. I take a turn or two around Rotten Row most days.’
‘Good.’
At that Lucien Howard also stood and both men gave their leave and were gone within a moment. When the door shut behind them Amethyst remained very still. Had Daniel arranged a meeting between them for tomorrow or not? The two almost-full glasses of lemonade stood on the table and she picked up the one Daniel had used and sipped from it. Ridiculous, she knew, but he made her feel that way: girlish, breathless, terrified.
Her father’s bell was ringing. Papa was waiting for an account of the meeting, she supposed, but still she did not move. Would Daniel ride alone tomorrow? Her maid always accompanied her to the park, but stayed on a seat near the gateway. Would this allow them some privacy? Did she want it?
Gerald had been disappointed in her so very quickly. She had held his attention only briefly before he had ventured forth to find other avenues of satisfaction. He had found her gauche and stiff. He had told her that the night he had left for the last time, a wife who was nothing like he had imagined she would be, but she could not dwell on it. ‘I deserve to be happy, and so does Papa,’ she muttered to herself and caught sight of a small bird on a branch outside.
‘If I close my eyes and count to ten and it is still there, then all shall be fine.’
When she opened them the sight of an empty branch greeted her, the buds of new leaves shivering with the motion of its parting.
Signs. She looked for them everywhere now, good and bad, but the hectic tinkle of her father’s bell had her moving from the room and up the wide oaken staircase.
* * *
She absolutely had to tell him. Today. Now. This minute. The early evening light sending redness into his raven hair and the green of the oaks all about them.
I have been married before. My husband died in a brothel because he could no longer abide the pretence of me in his marriage bed. It was not a successful union and by the end of it we hated each other.
That was what she should have said. Out loud. With conviction. Let Daniel run before the knots tied them irrevocably together and the blame game began. But she stayed silent as she watched him rein in his steed and move beside her. The time to confess everything about her tawdry past was not quite right and she wanted just for this moment to enjoy his company. Next time. She would definitely tell him of her unfortunate mistake next time they met.
‘I did not think you were coming,’ he remarked.
‘Papa passed a fidgety night and I have spent the day reading to him as it makes him relax. I was not certain you would wait.’
‘Then we both have much to learn about the other, Miss Cameron, for I have the patience of a saint.’
He didn’t look like anything celestial with his wild black hair caught in an untidy queue and his snowy cravat highlighting the darkness of his skin. Nay, today atop the power of his steed he looked like a soldier who might rule the world and use it in whatever way he wished.
The wickedness of his smile and the dancing pale green in his eyes took her form in, a scorching languid perusal that made her glance away. If she had been braver, she might have laughed into the sudden breeze and used his words as a challenge. She might have even thrown back her own. But the days of her certainty had long gone and the battered ends of the mouse-brown wig flew against her face, making her eyes water.
This is me now, this person, small and damaged and scared. A man like this is not to be played with, not to be taken lightly. The weight of the Cameron fortune was heavy on her shoulders and her father’s sickness heavier again as she stayed silent.
‘Our marriage notice will be in the paper tomorrow morning. I just thought to warn you of it.’
‘Warn me?’ She could not quite understand his meaning.
‘Society has the habit of being ingratiatingly interested in those who gain a title.’
‘Unexpectedly, you mean?’
‘A new countess is everybody’s business, Miss Cameron. It is the way of the world.’
His focus suddenly centred on a small group of mounted women on the path, the stillness in him magnified as he muttered something under his breath.
‘It is probably prudent to say nothing of our upcoming nuptials at this stage.’ He stopped his horse and waited and she did the same. ‘The ton is a small group, but their propensity to gossip is enormous and one wrong word can set them into a frenzy.’
* * *
Lady Charlotte Mackay and Lady Astoria Jordan were exactly the pair Daniel had no inclination to meet. Dressed in the finest of riding attire, they looked the picture of well-heeled perfection as they slowed down to chat. Amethyst, on the other hand, seemed to have drawn into herself, lips pursed and eyes dull. The light on her hair did nothing to help her appearance either. For the first time since he had met her he wondered if she wore a wig, ill fashioned and dreary. The thought was surprising.
Charlotte’s beauty, on the other hand, seemed to radiate around her, the soft blond of her coiffure under the riding cap catching the light and falling in an unbroken line to her ample bosom. A tinkling laugh completed the picture.
‘Daniel. I knew it was you.’ His name curled from her tongue as an invit
ation, the intimacy that they had once shared drawn into the words. Her glance took in the woman he was with and his bride-to-be stilled perceptibly.
‘Lady Charlotte Mackay, this is Miss Amethyst Cameron.’
‘Amethyst. An unusual name, I think.’ A frown marred the space between Charlotte’s sky-blue eyes as she tried to place the family. ‘Are you of the Camerons from Fife in Scotland or those closer?’
‘Neither, Lady Mackay.’ Amethyst’s answer was quietly given and then she smiled, deep dimples evident in each cheek and a knowing humour across her face.
Strength and honour had its own allure, Daniel thought, watching her deflect the other’s interest with such acumen. Out here in the open with the promise of a ride before them and a beautiful summer’s evening foretelling a hopeful outlook, Charlotte looked overdressed and overdone. However, as if realising that she would have little more in the way of conversation from Amethyst, she turned her attention towards him.
‘I will be here tomorrow at the same time. Perhaps we might enjoy a ride alone.’ Her hand closed over Daniel’s sleeve and in her inimitable style she leaned across to him, the riding habit she wore cut as low as it could be. ‘For old times’ sake. For the world that was before it all turned different. For us,’ she whispered closely, the breath of her words across his face daring more.
Once he might have smiled back his assent and followed her to the ends of the earth. But that was then and this was now. Amethyst Cameron had looked away, her eyes on the trees far in the distance as the horse below her shuffled.
Tipping his hat to both ladies he disengaged Charlotte’s grasp and made his steed walk on. When they were out of earshot he tried to explain.
‘Lady Mackay is lonely and—’
Amethyst interrupted him. ‘I don’t require an explanation, my lord. I won’t be that sort of wife.’
He laughed, but the sound was not humorous. ‘Then what sort of wife will you be, Miss Cameron?
She did not answer, but the red flush of anger on her face was telling and what had been a comfortable and easy meeting was suddenly difficult. But he needed to explain to her honestly so that she did not imagine he would be a philandering husband.
‘We were lovers for three-and-a-half years between the stints of my army duty.’ Now she looked around at him. ‘I was twenty-seven when I met Charlotte and thirty when she ran off and married Lord Spenser Mackay. He was an extremely wealthy Scottish landowner, you understand, and I was a second son and a soldier.’
‘So she broke your heart?’
His laughter this time was much more genuine. ‘At the time perhaps I thought that she had.’
‘But now...?’
‘Now with the wisdom of distance there is the greatest relief in the realisation that we would never have suited.’
‘I got the impression that she thinks exactly the opposite.’
‘Then she is wrong.’ The distance had returned to his voice. ‘Do you have a ball dress?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘There is a ball on Saturday night which will be well attended. I hope you might accompany me to it?’
‘Would your family be there?’
‘No. Mama has a slight cold and my two sisters are still young.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘I thought you might have known all my particular familial circumstances when you made me your choice of groom?’
For the first time he heard Amethyst laugh as though she meant it. She simply tossed her head back and sounded happy. He was mesmerised.
‘I left the snooping to my father, my lord.’
‘And I passed muster?’
‘It was the time you spent with Sir John Moore in La Corunna that sealed it for my father, I think. It was said that you were quite the hero on the heights of Penasquedo and he has always admired those who might lay down their life for crown and country, you see.’
‘And what of your choice?’
The good humour vanished in a second.
‘I no longer trust myself enough to make wise decisions.’
‘Which implies that you have made some foolish ones?’
‘People change on you when you least expect it, my lord.’ She looked at him directly now, the dark of her eyes marked with a softer gold.
‘Aye, that they do. Lady Mackay became a woman I did not recognise, but I wouldn’t say her intransigence was my problem.’
The small show of her dimples heartened him. ‘The blame was hers, you mean.’
‘Entirely.’
‘And you moved on without looking back?’ she asked curiously.
‘I did.’
* * *
This conversation was taking a surprising turn. Honesty was something she favoured and Lord Daniel Wylde had not held back about his past or lied about it.
Unlike her.
Such knowledge shrivelled her good mood, though their kiss of the other day still lingered below each glance and word. A scorching and undeniable truth embracing neither logic nor reason.
Passing into a narrower path, he took the reins of her horse and pulled them both to a stop. ‘Even given the unusual circumstances of our union, Miss Cameron, I want us to be friends.’
Friends. As she had been at first with Gerald Whitely. She hoped he did not see the consternation on her face because what he was offering was honourable.
‘I certainly would not wish for two years of bickering.’
She shook her head. Everything he said made perfect sense and she had come into this betrothal only with the expectation of filling the last months of her father’s life with happiness. But the kiss they had shared had skewed things, made them different and she could not help but hope that he might eschew convention and take her in his arms, here in the most public of places. That he might kiss her again, show her it had not been all a figment of her imagination, fill in the empty fears with a warm certainty.
But of course he did not, he merely called his horse on and challenged her.
‘You ride well, Miss Cameron. At Montcliffe after we are married I would deem it an honour to pit my horse against your own.’
She gave him a smile, her roan shimmying as she let her attention wander. With Montcliffe beside her and the summer breeze in her face Amythest felt the sort of freedom that she had missed for months now.
‘I think for a fair competition you would have to allow me a starting distance. Your mount looks as if he might beat anything he was up against.’
He laughed and the sound was honest and true. ‘Deimos here was well blooded in the Peninsular Campaign in Spain.’
‘Deimos?’ she repeated the name. ‘The Grecian spirit of dread and terror?’
He smiled. ‘Not many would know that.’
‘You took him to the Continent?’
‘I rode with the Eighteenth Light Dragoons under Lord Paget.’
‘Is that where you hurt your leg?’
‘On the last day at La Corunna. The medic couldn’t get the bullet out.’
‘So it is still in there?’ she asked, horrified.
‘And hurting like hell.’ Unexpectedly he smiled. ‘I don’t usually talk about the injury and certainly seldom admit to any pain.’
‘Why do you not simply have the shot removed then? Here, in London?’
‘The surgeon said that it lay near an artery. If they accidentally severed it during the operation, I should lose either my leg or my life, so at this stage the option of doing nothing is the sensible one. Besides, to complete my side of the marriage deal I still need to scare people away from your father, Miss Cameron.’
‘I think you could do that anyway, Lord Montcliffe, with one leg or two.’
‘Do you?’ His demeanour had changed. Now he leant towards her, taking the bridle to hold her mare still. She felt the b
lood in her cheeks rise as it never had before, so red that her whole face throbbed with the consternation.
‘I like it when you blush.’
Daniel Wylde was lethal. With just a few words he could make her forget everything and believe in fairy tales with happy endings against impossible odds.
Better to remember the way Charlotte Mackay had looked at her with that innate snobbery so prevalent in the English upper classes as she had sniffed out the presence of trade like a bloodhound. Tomorrow when the notice of their intention to marry went into the papers Amethyst could hardly bear to think of what the repercussions would be. But the very worst of it was that she wanted this man before her, wanted his kisses, his smiles and his compliments, no matter what.
‘The ball you speak of, would it be very formal?’ she asked apprehensively.
‘It would indeed. Did they ever teach you how to dance at your Gaskell Street Presbyterian Church School.’
‘They taught me what they knew, though there were times when I wondered just how much that actually was.’
‘Did you learn how to waltz?’
‘No.’
‘A pity, for they call it the dance of love.’ Now his amusement was easily seen. ‘If you like, I would be most happy to teach you the steps.’
* * *
He loved the way she was so easily flustered, this woman of commerce and business and brusqueness, though his attention was caught by a series of heavy pins around the line of her hair that had been dislodged by the movement of the ride.
‘Do you wear a wig?’
Her fingers instantly came up to where it was he looked, pushing the dull brown hair forward in one easy swipe.
‘I do.’ Her hand shook as she tried to secure the loosened clips.