St. Raven (14 page)

Cressida put her hands to her face, finding mask and veil. She stripped them off, dropped them, felt the head veil slither after them. She wished she could deny St. Raven’s analysis, but it rang true—oh so true. She had not known her father long, but she’d sensed a growing restlessness in him.

He must have wanted England, wanted to reunite with his wife and child, wanted to taste the highest levels of society as Sir Arthur, rich nabob. But perhaps within a year the novelty had palled.

Had he been conscious of what he was doing, and why?

“All those stories,” she said. “Fortunes won and lost. Gambling with his life. Do you think he knows what he does? That he seeks out risk?”

“Who’s to say? But I’ve known men like that, and they never admitted knowing. They complained of their misfortune, but kept doing what caused it.” He moved something with a heavy grating sound. “What is this huge wooden box?”

She welcomed the distraction he offered.

“The trough for kneading the dough. I came here now and then to watch. The making of bread fascinated me because I’d not seen it before. In Matlock we bought bread from a shop down the street.”

How provincial that seemed. She was sure the Duke of St. Raven had never bought a loaf of bread from a shop.

“I used to love the bakehouse at Lea Park,” he said, as if to confirm her thought. “I didn’t study the processes, but it was always warm, always with this lingering smell of baked bread, and generally provided a treat for hungry boys.”

“Is Lea Park your home?”

“What’s home?”

She pinned her restless mind to that strange question. “Home is where your family is.”

“Your father was in India, but that wasn’t home for you.”

“Home is where a person grows up, then.”

“Until they move.”

She stirred. Conversation wasn’t working. His voice alone brushed over her skin, deepening her breath.

Or perhaps her hands twitched to touch him. She swayed with the need to press her face against his chest, to inhale the sandalwood she was sure she could smell now, even over the ghosts of past baking…

She moved back and came up against the warm, smooth plastered arch of the big bake oven. Letting that soothe her, she concentrated on what he’d said, on what she did not understand. “So Lea Park is your home? Where you grew up?”

She saw him settle, too, probably with his hips against the sideboard, where it ran beneath the windows.

“No. I grew up in Somerset, in a house called Cornhallows. A small manor house not much different from this place. It didn’t have a bakehouse, because it sat almost in the village and there was a baker there.”

“So you did buy bread from the shop.”

He didn’t immediately reply, and she sensed puzzlement.

“It sounds like a pleasant home,” she said quickly.

“It was until my parents died.”

The sudden taste of sorrow seemed to pass from his words to her heart, swamping irrelevant itches. “How?”

“Drowned crossing the Severn.”

“Both together?” She couldn’t imagine that.

“I tried to stay on at Cornhallows, but of course, no one pays any attention to a twelve-year-old. It was only leased, so others live there now.”

Cressida breathed in, feeling the air rough against her mouth and throat at the thought of that poor child. Twelve years old. No wonder he’d asked what home was.

“But wasn’t your father the duke?”

“The duke was my uncle, but I was his heir even then, and likely to inherit.”

“So you went to live with him? At Lea Park?”

But that seemed wrong. She didn’t know much about the Duke of St. Raven, but Lea Park didn’t sound right.

She was attacked by a sudden sequence of memories. The duke seen at a distance, at theater, ball, rout, and soiree. Smiling, laughing, life burning in him like a torch so that he seemed the center of every event. He had been the center of every event—as the stag is the center of a hunt.

“Lea Park is the seat of the Duke of Arran. He was a friend of my father’s and agreed to foster me. I was educated with his heir and thus learned the ducal trade.”

Sympathetic talk seemed to be working as an antidote to lust, but now Cressida was trapped in a new insanity. Now she desperately needed to
know
this man, to understand him.

To ease him.

Ah, new folly, but she couldn’t resist, here in the fragrant dark. “Why didn’t you go to live with the old Duke of St. Raven?”

She heard a wry chuckle. “I wasn’t the most popular person at St. Raven’s Mount. My father and the duke had been at odds almost from birth. The duke—he was never referred to as anything else in our household— was ten years older, and had apparently been haughty all along. My father had always refused to bow down to his brother. He was a lighthearted iconoclast.”

“A republican?” she asked, surprised.

“Not ardently, but any enemy of his brother was his friend. A twelve-year-old doesn’t understand such things, but he left a sort of diary recording his approval of the revolution in France. He would doubtless have cheered beside the guillotine when it sliced off the duke’s head.”

“Oh, surely not!”

“We’ll never know. But you don’t want to listen to my sordid family history.”

Yes, she did. She wanted to know everything about him.

“Most of England would gobble up your intimate family history, my lord Duke.”

She was rewarded by a laugh that sounded genuine.

“Very well, then. My father and the duke hated each other, and much of it coalesced on the succession. The duke regarded keeping his mad brother out of his shoes as a holy duty. I confess to some sympathy, given my father’s flaunting of his revolutionary views.

“Each daughter must have been an infuriating disappointment, and he didn’t spare his wife that. She was not the sort to be beaten down by his disapproval, so instead she turned hard and bitter. Which I give thanks for, as it was the reason I was not sent to live at Mount St. Raven. She vowed never to live beneath a roof with me.”

“How foolish. If she had been kind, you could have become like a son to her.”

He laughed again. “Dear Cressida…”

The disbelief shriveled her.

“Do you see her as the motherly sort? Even the Duchess of Arran saw her children for only an hour a day until they came to an age to be interesting. I gather my aunt did even less. Her daughters were raised in a separate house from birth until they had their courses. Then they moved into Mount St. Raven and were presented to her daily for examination of their progress in ladylike accomplishments. Not, I assume, life as it is lived in Matlock.”

“There’s no need to sneer. It is not, I assume, life as it was lived at Cornhallows, either.”

“
Touche
. But my father was a mad republican.”

“Your father sounds more sane than his brother.”

“Possible. I have reports that my uncle frothed at the mouth when told of my birth. I suspect my father would have liked to have dangled a string of six boys in front of the duke—he could probably have driven him into the grave that way—but he married late, and had more sense than to marry a young miss. My mother was thirty-five when he married her, an independent, intelligent woman.”

Cressida recognized a deep fondness there. Beneath adult cynicism and bitterness, did that shocking childhood loss still bleed?

“She could have no more children?”

“Apparently not. She suffered two miscarriages after me. My father probably made sure she didn’t conceive again, for she was more precious to him even than points in his rivalry with his brother. And he had, after all, achieved his aim. His line would continue the duchy, not his brother’s. My father’s early death must have been some solace to the duke and duchess, but not much.”

She wished they were closer in all ways and that she could offer sympathy in a touch. “Can it really have been as hateful as that?”

“Oh, yes. I encountered them once in London. I was eighteen, and I remember the shocking awareness of hatred. The duke merely looked through me, but the duchess… I believe she would have put a dagger through my heart if she could have avoided hanging for it.”

It was so far beyond Cressida’s ability to imagine that she could only shake her head. “But you had a good home at Lea Park?”

“Thanks be to the Peckworths. They’re a kindly family.”

Peckworths. Cressida’s memory made connections. “Lady Anne Peckworth! Daughter of the Duke of Arran.”

“You know her?”

Cressida almost laughed, though she supposed she might have found herself involved in charity work with a duke’s daughter. It was one way for outsiders to push their way into the circles of the great.

“I saw you with her at Drury Lane. It was the first night of
A Daring Lady
.”

And you kissed her hand in a way that could break my heart now if I were so foolish as to care.

Cressida concentrated on that image of him and Lady Anne, looking into one another’s eyes, connected, intimate. If she had the slightest temptation to idiotic dreams, it should remind her that he was already committed.

She tried to pity poor Lady Anne, bound to this feckless rake. She failed. Perhaps even crumbs were worthwhile…

“An amusing play, don’t you think?”

His words dragged her out of her thoughts.

“Amusing? Shockingly so. My mother didn’t approve, but my father laughed uproarishly.”

“And you?”

Remembering that night, she was amazed that she’d paid so much attention to the stage when she could have been looking at him. “I think I missed some of the witty references.”

She saw him move. Saw and heard him begin to cross the dark room toward her, though his Eastern slippers made no sound.

“Are you feeling more enlightened now?”

The air was suddenly thin. “A little.”

She remembered a joke in the play about proud cocks that made altogether too much sense now. Her wickedness began to stir again, and he was almost here.

Their purpose.

Their quest.

Think of that, Cressida!

“What are we going to do?” she blurted.

There was a ticking clock in the room so the bakers could tell how long their loaves were in the oven, but in the dim light she couldn’t make out the time. Most of the hour must still need to be passed, and he was too close. Only a few feet away.

She turned, trying to avoid him without seeming to, and her hand touched the iron door to the oven. She flinched, expecting a burn, but then realized that it was only warm. She pushed down the handle and opened it between them. Hot aromatic air rolled out.

“They must have baked those tarts and rolls and such earlier in the day.” Succulent tarts. Long rolls…

Don’t think about those things!

He moved around the door, came closer.

She needed a new barrier. “What of Lady Anne?”

“What of her?”

“Rumor says you will marry.”

He was only inches away. “Rumor, as usual, is wrong. She’s my foster sister, and she’s in love with someone else.”

Her insane heart leaped.

Then he asked, “Jealous?”

“No!” Cressida retreated, but she was trapped, her back against the other side of the oven.

“We are comrades in arms tonight, Cressida. Nothing more, but nothing less. And I like you in my arms.”

He took the extra step, trapping her between his heat and hardness and the oven’s, resting his arms on either side of her, leaning in to kiss her in the dense darkness his body created.

This was wrong. Worse, it was foolish. All that talk about his family, about his childhood pains, could have been a rake’s trick, designed to weaken her. It suggested an intimacy that did not exist.

And yet, he had just warned her of the truth. Nothing more, nothing less. They had this night, and only this night. She thought that her lips were silently speaking this uncertainty against his. Whatever they were doing, it was enough to stir the turmoil inside her to fever pitch again.

“What are you doing?”

“Pleasuring you,” he murmured. “Trust me. Surrender to pleasure.”

“I shouldn’t. We shouldn’t. What are we
doing?
…”

“Exploring. Explore with me, nymph, and we will all the pleasures prove…”

“Marlowe. A very naughty poem.”

He moved back a little, but his hands still caged her. “Don’t run from this, Cressida. You have the name and the heart of an explorer. Explore me, Cressida Mandeville.” He brushed her mouth with his, more torment than kiss. “Come on, sweetheart. Explore. I promise you a safe return to harbor.”

He slid his hands down her arms to capture her hands, to draw them to his sides and put them there. “Pull my shirt loose.”

It was as well she was leaning back against the oven or she might have slid to the floor. Hands over hers, he pulled his satin shirt loose of his trousers inch by inch and then—oh, Lord!—he pressed her hands to his hot skin.

He held them there for a moment, then played his hands back up her arms and across her shoulders to feather-stroke her neck.

She couldn’t help but stretch, but lean her head back against the curving oven. Couldn’t help but flex her fingers against his skin, so soft and smooth over bone and muscle.

His knowing fingers explored her neck and traveled up into the edge of her loose hair, where his gentle play was like magic sparkles.

She pulled him closer. When his lips touched hers again, she pressed. Then, hesitantly, she put out her tongue to lick.

Tris smiled and deepened the kiss. Cressida Mandeville had been driving him mad for hours, and now she was willing to play. Besides, he’d left her dissatisfied earlier. How very ungallant.

But then she pulled back. “I’m afraid.”

Her retreat gave access to the buttons down the front of her jacket. As his fingers crept there, he asked, “Of what, love?”

“Of this.”

He undid the first button. “Do you want to stop?”

“No…”

He smiled at the breathy hesitation and undid another button.

She reached up and grasped his hand. “We can’t! What if I… conceive?”