A Summer to Remember (30 page)

He was undecided about whether he should call first at the dower house or at Newbury Abbey itself. But the dower house, he found, was just a short distance inside the gates of the park. He went there first. The ladies were at the abbey, a servant informed him, and so he rode the rest of the way along a lengthy, winding driveway and presented his card at Newbury Abbey with the request that the Countess of Kilbourne receive him.

He was kept waiting for only a couple of minutes before being ushered up to the drawing room, where several people were awaiting his appearance, all on their feet. Lauren was not among them.

She had not been as reticent as he, he could see immediately. These people all
knew
. Lady Muir was looking pale, the Dowager Lady Kilbourne grave, Portfrey poker-faced. But the small, blond-haired, exquisitely pretty young lady who hurried toward him, her hand extended, was smiling.

“Lord Ravensberg?” she said. “What a pleasure this is.”

“Ma’am?” He bowed over her hand.

“Ravensberg?” A tall, blond man, about Kit’s own age, came up beside her and bowed without offering his hand.

“Kilbourne?”

He was in the presence, Kit realized, of the man who had meant so much to Lauren all her life, whom she had been within a few minutes of marrying, whom she had loved and probably still did. And of the infamous Lily, who had blighted all Lauren’s hopes and dreams.

“What a pleasant surprise,” the countess said. “Do come and have a seat. It is rather chilly outside today, is it not? You know everyone else, I believe?”

The ladies curtsied. Portfrey inclined his head. He was holding a small child against one shoulder, Kit noticed for the first time. The duchess smiled warmly.

“You have come, Lord Ravensberg,” she said. “I am so glad as I have predicted it.”

“And I,” the countess added, taking Kit’s arm and leading him toward a chair. “Lauren wrote to you before telling any of us—even Gwen—that she was going to end her betrothal. We have all been mystified and very sad because Gwen and my mama-in-law were both firmly of the opinion that it was a love match and very much approved of by your family. Lauren insisted that the breakup was all her idea, that none of the blame must be laid at your door, but of course we have been doing just that. We love Lauren very dearly, you see, and it is always easier to blame strangers. But now you have come, and you may defend yourself in person.”

“Lily!” Kilbourne said. “Ravensberg owes us no explanation at all. We do not even know why he has come.”

“I came,” Kit said, “to speak with Lauren. Where is she?”

“What is it you wish to say?” Kilbourne asked. “She has ended the betrothal. None of us knows why exactly, but we can safely guess that she has no further wish to see or speak with you.”

“She is best left alone, Lord Ravensberg,” the dowager added. “She was quite adamant in her insistence that she had not acted out of impulse when she wrote to you. I do not know what happened at Alvesley, but she is quite determined not to have you despite the social stigma of a broken engagement. If this is a courtesy call, I thank you on behalf of my niece. If it is not, you see a formidable array of her concerned relatives before you ready to protect her from you.”

“Poor Lord Ravensberg,” the duchess said with a sympathetic laugh. “You will be thinking you have stepped onto an Arctic continent. We are being unfair to you. Lauren really has insisted that none of the blame for what has happened is yours.”

“She is down on the beach,” Lady Muir said quietly from some distance away.

Kit looked at her and inclined his head. He still had not sat down.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said.

“She said she wanted to be alone,” Kilbourne said. “She said she did not want to be disturbed.”

“And so, Lord Ravensberg,” the countess added, smiling, “you will have all the privacy in the world to say to her what you have come to say.”

“I’ll not have her upset,” Kilbourne said.

The countess relinquished Kit’s arm in order to take her husband’s. She smiled up at him. “Lauren is twenty-six years old, Neville,” she said. “She is very sensible and has just spent weeks convincing us that she is in control of her own life and can make her own decisions. If she does not want to speak to Lord Ravensberg, she will tell him so.”

When Kilbourne looked down into his wife’s eyes, Kit realized two things. Lauren was very much loved here at Newbury Abbey, especially perhaps by the two who had caused her the most pain. And Kilbourne was consumed by guilt for what he had made her suffer. Consequently he was doing all in his power to see to it that she did not suffer again.

“I will walk down to the beach if someone will show me the way,” Kit said.

“It is going to rain,” Kilbourne said, glancing toward the window. “Tell her to come home without delay.”

The countess smiled dazzlingly at her husband though she spoke to Kit. “Tell her to take shelter in the cottage, Lord Ravensberg. It is closer.”

“Walk down over the lawn,” Lady Muir instructed him, “bearing right as you go until you reach the cliff path.”

Kit bowed to them all and made his exit.

It was not really raining when he reached the steep path down the side of the cliff. It was not even quite drizzling. But his face felt damp and his ungloved hands clammy. It was certainly going to be raining soon.

He realized where he was when he was halfway down. Lauren had described it once—the short valley with a waterfall and pool at the inner end and a picturesque cottage beside the pool. It was where she had once seen Kilbourne and his countess frolicking and had concluded that she was incapable of that kind of passion herself. There was no sign of Lauren. He turned his gaze to the beach and shaded his eyes as he looked along the wide stretch of golden sand.

And then he spotted her. And smiled. And knew beyond all doubt that the summer had not been in vain for her. Wearing a cloak but no bonnet on a blustery, damp day, she was in the middle of the beach, facing a wild, tumultuous sea, and perched at the very pinnacle of a great tall rock, which from this angle appeared to have almost sheer sides.

At the same time the scene chilled him. This she had done alone. She had not needed help or support—not from him or anyone else. Seeing her thus, he knew that she had achieved self-knowledge and peace. That she was capable of living her life her way. That she needed no
one.

That she did not need him.

Foolishly, he was tempted to turn back before she saw him. But he had something that needed to be said. Something he must say.

He thought the wind might blow him over when he stepped out of the relative shelter of the path onto the bridge over the shallow river. He lowered his head so that he would not lose his hat. He was on the beach, plodding over the sand, when he finally looked up again. She had seen him. She was watching him approach, sitting quietly at the top of the rock, clasping her knees. It seemed to take forever to walk the rest of the way.

He looked up at her and grinned. “Stuck?” he asked. “Do you need rescuing?”

“No,” she said with all her characteristic quiet dignity, “thank you.”

And she moved from her place to descend the other side of the rock. It was far more scalable than the side by which he had approached, he saw when he walked around it. Even so, she descended at a pace that would have put a tortoise to sleep. He would have climbed up to be close enough to catch her if she slipped, but something told him that it would be entirely the wrong thing to do. Finally first one foot and then the other was on firm ground—or on shifting sand, at least. She turned and looked at
him.

He opened his mouth to speak and discovered that he had no idea what he would say.

She made no move to help him.

They stared at each other.

And because his mind really was quite terrifyingly blank, he leaned forward and kissed her instead of talking. Her lips softened and pressed back lightly against his.

“Lauren,” he said.

“Kit.” After a few moments she rescued him. “Why are you here? Why have you come?”

The dampness in the air had turned to drizzle.

“To instruct you to hurry back to the house,” he said, “if you wish to listen to Kilbourne. To suggest the cottage as a closer destination if you prefer the advice of the countess.” He grinned again.

“Kit.” She frowned. “I did not want to see you again. I really did not.”

He swallowed and set a hand against the rock beyond her shoulder. He lowered his head and noticed idly that the sand was destroying the shine on his riding boots—and he had come without his valet.

“You are still here,” he said. “Still at Newbury.” He had braced himself for the possibility that she would already be gone.

“Only until tomorrow,” she said. “Tomorrow I will be going to Bath to choose a house. I am going to live there.”

“Is that what you really want?” he asked.

“You know it is,” she said. “Kit, why have you come? Where is Lady Freyja?”

“Freyja?” He looked up at her with a frown. “At Lindsey Hall, I suppose. Why?” But he understood before she could answer. “There is nothing between Freyja and me, Lauren. There was once very briefly, but it was a long time ago. Now there is nothing. Nothing whatsoever and never will be.”

“Yet you suit,” she said.

“Do we?” He considered the matter. “Yes, I suppose there is a similarity. That does not mean we would
suit
. We would not. Did this misconception have anything to do with your breaking off our betrothal?”

“Of course not.” She sighed and leaned back against the rock. “It was all arranged even before I met Lady Freyja, remember? Kit,
why
are you here?”

“There is something I need to tell you,” he said. “Something I should have told you before you left Alvesley. Something you ought to know whatever you decide to do with the knowledge. Once I have told you, you have only to say the word, Lauren, and I will walk back along this beach and up to the cliff top and into the village and I will never trouble you again, never try to see you again. It is a promise.”

“Kit—”

He set one finger across her lips and looked into her eyes.

“I want to marry you,” he said. “I want it more than I have ever wanted anything else in my life. For many reasons. But only one of them really matters to me. It is the one I did not tell you of because it seemed somehow dishonorable after you had carried out your side of the bargain so sweetly and so well. I
love
you. That is it, you see, the part I omitted. Just that. I
love
you. I do not believe it can really hurt you to know. It lays no obligation on you. I just needed to say it. I’ll leave now if you wish.”

She said nothing, just pressed her head back harder against the rock and gazed at him with her lovely violet eyes. The drizzle was turning to light rain. It was running in droplets down her face. But it was not raindrops that were welling in her eyes.

“Tell me to go,” he whispered.

She started to say something and then swallowed. She tried again. “I do not
need
you, you know,” she said.

“I know.” His heart was down in his boots somewhere.

“I do not need anyone,” she said. “I can do this alone, this living business. All my life I have shaped myself into being what others expect me to be so that I will belong somewhere, be accepted somewhere, be loved by someone. When I knew I could not belong to Neville, I felt as if I had been cut adrift in the universe. I anchored myself by retreating into an even more rigid gentility. I don’t need to do any of that any longer. And I
do
have you to thank. But I don’t
need
you any longer, Kit. I am strong enough on my own.”

“Yes.” He bowed his head and closed his eyes again. “Yes, I know.”

“I am free, you see,” she said, “to love or to withhold love. Love and dependence need no longer be the same thing to me. I am
free
to love. That is why I love you, and it is the
way
I love you. If you have come here, Kit, because you think you owe me something, because you believe I might crumble without your protection, then go away again with my blessing and find happiness with someone else.”

“I
love
you,” he said again.

She gazed at him for a long time, her eyes still swimming in tears, and then she smiled, very slowly, and very, very radiantly.

He wrapped his arms about her waist, lifted her off her feet, and twirled her about in circles, while she braced her hands on his shoulders, flung her head back to expose her face to the rain, and laughed.

Kit whooped, and because the echo from the cliffs was so impressive, he threw back his head too and howled like a wolf.

23

H
ow is your grandmama?”
“Busy setting out the family christening robes.”
“Oh.”

“I am to marry you before Christmas, get you with child
by
Christmas, and be pacing the floors of Alvesley by this time next year, tearing out my hair in clumps and wearing out my boot leather while you deliver our first boy. Strict orders. Why do you think I
really
came? Just to tell you that I love you?”

“Foolish of me.”

By the time sanity had returned down on the beach, it was raining in earnest and they had linked hands and made a dash for the cottage. Lauren had thrown off her cloak and shoes—her bonnet and gloves, she remembered too late, were still wedged in somewhere at the foot of the great rock. She was rubbing her hair with a towel and watching Kit, minus his drab riding coat, stooping down on his haunches before the fireplace, building a fire with the wood and kindling beside it.

If this were a dream, she thought, she hoped she would not wake up for a long, long while—like the rest of her life.

“Have you read your mother’s letters?”

“Yes, all of them. She is not at all respectable, Kit. And that is a massive understatement. She sounds so delightful that my heart aches. But you may want to think twice about allying yourself with her daughter.”

“Ah,” he said, reaching for the tinderbox and setting a light to the fire, “that explains a few things. It was her daughter, I believe, who swam naked in the lake at Alvesley, almost casting me into a fit of the vapors and drowning me. It was her daughter who came after me on one occasion to spend the night alone with me in the gamekeeper’s hut. Perhaps she
is
too shockingly fast for me.”

“Ki-it—”

He got to his feet, brushed his hands together, and turned a laughing face to her. She rubbed harder with the towel.

“And just look at you now,” he said.

She looked downward and saw in some embarrassment that her damp dress had molded itself to her body. She laughed.

“We cannot have you catching a chill,” he said, glancing through the open doorway into the small bedchamber within, “and coughing and sneezing your way through our wedding. It would just not be romantic.” He strode off into the bedchamber and came back with a blanket. “Come here by the fire.”

She came and stood meekly before him while he stripped off her clothes, looking at her frankly and appreciatively as he did so and before he wrapped the blanket about her. He talked to her all the while.

“Portfrey was clutching an infant,” he said. “They cannot afford a nurse?”

She chuckled. “The baby is absolutely adorable,” she said, “and is shamelessly spoiled by us all. I have never seen Elizabeth happier or his grace so relaxed. And Lily can never have enough of her new half-brother.”

“Are you now in charity with the countess, then?” he asked.

“I have always recognized that under other circumstances I would have liked her enormously,” she said. “She is sunny-natured and unaffected and loving. She has always been unfailingly kind and sympathetic to me. Now I can love her.”

“And Kilbourne?”

He drew her against him, opening back the edges of the blanket as he did so. She could feel his superfine coat, his riding breeches, his leather boots against her naked flesh and felt a rush of awareness more intense than if he had been unclothed.

“I love him too, Kit,” she said. “I always have and always will. If we had married on that day, I believe we would have had a good marriage. I believe I would have been content and would have thought myself happy. I would never have realized that my love for him was that of a devoted sister. I would never have wondered why I could feel no—no
passion
for him. I would simply have thought that was my nature.”

“But it is not?” She had tipped her face up, and he was bent over it, his eyes roaming it.

“No.” She shook her head.

“Lord help me,” he said. “You don’t feel a passion for
me,
do you, Lauren? And expect me to
act
on it?”

She laughed. And she did something quite outrageous—she rubbed herself against him and gazed at him through half-closed eyes. Desire stabbed down along her inner thighs.

“Devil take that rain,” he said. “It has trapped me in a deserted cottage with a woman who has conceived a
passion
for me. And no one is going to come riding to my rescue either. I distinctly remember someone up at the house telling someone else that you had asked not to be disturbed down here. And then someone telling
me
that I would have all the privacy I needed to say what I had to say to you.
Now
what do I do?”

She loved the way he could hold his features solemn, even alarmed, while his eyes danced with laughter.

“Absolutely nothing at all,” she told him. She lowered her voice as her hands found the top buttonhole of his coat.
“Yet.”

He shivered elaborately and his eyes danced.

“I begin to think,” he said, “that I could grow to like women who are free to love.”

“And I begin to think,” she said, still in her low, velvet voice, “that you are about to be driven to the brink of madness by one of them, my lord.”

“Oh, goody,” he murmured agreeably.

She opened back his coat and pushed it off his shoulders and down his arms while he stood relaxed and unmoving. Waistcoats, she discovered then, had far too many buttons, all of them small, each with an accompanying buttonhole that seemed smaller yet. She did not hurry. She occupied herself while her hands worked by feathering kisses over his throat and neck above his cravat. She ran her tongue along the seam of the long scar beneath his jaw and surprised an epithet from him that was definitely not suitable for the ears of a lady. She kissed his mouth, which he held relaxed. She prodded her tongue beyond his lips, exploring the soft, moist inner flesh with its tip. She stretched her tongue deep into his mouth.

“I have won praise and commendation from high places,” he said conversationally when his mouth was free, her eyes being needed to discover the secrets of the front flap of his breeches, “for military feats that required only half the courage and discipline I am displaying this afternoon. I hope you realize that you are in the presence of extraordinary heroism.”

Sometime during the last ten minutes or so, she had lost her blanket, Lauren realized. It did not matter. The fire had burned up and taken the damp chill from the air. In fact the cottage felt almost uncomfortably warm.

“A word of advice,” he said, “from a man who has been undressing me for almost thirty years. Tackle the boots first. Would you like me to be a participant yet? Shall I haul them off for you?”

“No.” She kneeled down on the floor.

“An erotically submissive posture,” he commented with a sigh, raising one foot. “Entirely deceptive, of course. Yes, you have to tug hard. You are not about to break my ankle, I assure you. I feel inclined to urge you to hurry so that we can reach the good part. But alas, you are turning all my preconceptions on their head, Lauren. This tortoiselike seduction feels excruciatingly good.”

“And this is only the beginning,” she promised, looking up at him from beneath her lashes before pulling off the second boot and standing up again.

“Witch!” he said. “I strolled into Lady Mannering’s ballroom that night all unsuspecting, poor innocent that I was. You looked like a perfectly harmless lady. Respectable, prim.”

“Prudish,” she said.

“Precisely.”

“I should be calling for the hartshorn now, then,” she said. “You look neither innocent nor harmless, Kit.” She had pulled off first his breeches and then his drawers.

He looked down at himself and she touched him at the same moment, cupping him lightly in both hands, amazed at her own brazenness, half crazed with suppressed desire. He looked up and their eyes met.

“You can continue this game all afternoon and all evening if you wish, love,” he said. “Sex games are delicious. I look forward to playing an infinite variety of them with you for the rest of our lives. But unless you have a definite preference for prolonging this, I think we might be better occupied on the bed in there. I would very much like to put that inside you.”

The greatest surprise of all was the discovery that
not
being touched could be every bit as arousing as having his hands and mouth all over her. He was still standing motionless, his arms loose at his sides, his eyes, heavy-lidded, devoid of laughter, gazing into her own. But his words were her undoing. She was suddenly weak-kneed.

“I thought,” she said, “you would never ask. A lady never invites a gentleman to bed.”

His hands did not touch her until she had pulled back the blankets and lain down on her back on the bed and reached up for him. They touched her then only at her hips and beneath her buttocks as she spread her legs wide. He came down on top of her and mounted her with one deep, hard, satisfying thrust.

She drew a few slow breaths.

“We can do this the easy way,” he said, raising his head and grinning down at her, all the old roguery back in his eyes, “or I can aim at the highest medal of honor and ride the long, hard route home.
Very
long and very hard. Which shall it be?”

“Which is the road to near madness?” she asked, hooking her legs snugly about his and tilting herself slightly so that she could receive him more deeply.

“The less easy road,” he said.

“The long, hard ride, then, please,” she said, using her low voice again and running her palms over the muscles of his shoulders as she watched the laughter fade from his eyes. “Please, my love.”

It was very long. And very hard. It took a great deal of energy. After a while she became aware of the dampness of their sweat, the heat of their bodies, the heavy, labored sound of their breathing, the silken pounding of their joining, the erotic sound of wetness, the rhythmic squeaking of the bed.

For a while her enjoyment was tempered by the fear that it would end too soon, that she would not reach the startling explosion of pleasure she had experienced on the island bank among the wildflowers when he had touched her with his hand and then taken her on top of him. But after a while she knew with an instinct born of love and trust that he did indeed have the fortitude and the sensitivity to wait for her—as he had at the lake.

It came slowly. Achingly slowly, first with an intense physical yearning in the place where they rode together, and then swirling in slow spirals, down into her legs, back into her bowels, up into her stomach, her breasts, her throat, her nose. It came so slowly she feared there could be no ending, no climax, no fulfillment.

“Relax now, love,” he murmured against her ear. “Let me do the rest for you. Let yourself open and I’ll come to you. Trust me.”

Words dimly remembered. Had he spoken them to her before? She was afraid. Mortally afraid. He might as easily have asked her to leap off a high cliff into his waiting arms. But she had known long ago that she would trust him with her life. She had given him her love since then and had accepted his this very day. All that was left to do was to trust him with her heart, to withhold nothing that was herself—to believe with her heart, as she already did with her intellect, that he would never abuse the gift, that he would never hold her love imprisoned.

She launched herself forward off the cliff, trusting, never doubting, that he would catch her.

“Ah, love.” He was thrusting faster, deeper into her. “Oh, God!”

She was falling, shuddering out of control, never fearing for a moment, never doubting. He cried out, and his arms and his body caught her at the bottom of her descent, wrapping firmly about her, pinning her safe and warm and sated against the mattress. She could hear her heartbeat pounding in her ears. And his too. They beat as one.

He was very heavy. She could scarcely breathe. Her legs were stiff from being pressed apart for so long. She was sore inside. And she had never been more comfortable in her life.

“We,” he said, his voice sounding shockingly normal, “are going to have the first banns read next Sunday. It is high time I made an honest woman of you. Besides, it may be possible to pass off an eight-month child as an early bird, but a seven- or six-month child would look scandalously suspicious. It might even be whispered that we had anticipated our wedding night.”

“Shocking indeed.” She sighed with contentment. “Sunday it will be, then.”

“A big
ton
wedding one month from now,” he said. “Both our families will be set on it, and frankly I do not have the energy to argue. Do you?”

“I would like a big wedding,” she admitted.

“Good. That is settled, then.” He kissed her temple. “I have just made a delightful discovery, considering the fact that we are going to be sharing a bed for the rest of our lives. You make a wonderfully comfortable mattress.”

“And you make a tolerable blanket,” she said, untwining her legs and stretching them luxuriously beside his. She yawned lazily. “Stop talking, Kit, and let’s sleep.”