Julie Anne Long (5 page)

But as he followed the line of Rebecca’s body with his eyes, he could see she was slim and sweetly curved, a fact that was apparent despite the fact that nearly every inch of her was covered in an unpresuming gray printed cotton. He discreetly considered her rounded bosom, and found himself nostalgic for the deeper necklines popular a few years ago. Her clear gray-green eyes, a very singular shade, regarded him coolly through her chestnut lashes, and a lock of red-gold hair, which she seemed to have rather a lot of, had escaped from its confines and was fluttering about her mouth. Edelston remembered pressing his lips against those plush lips. Of course, his intent at the time had been to compromise and thus snare a different girl entirely.

She’s really rather lovely. Very lovely.
For some reason, the realization irritated him. And the chit was actually
bored
. He was unaccustomed to being considered anything other than fascinating. When one had a godlike profile and golden hair one was fascinating by default; everyone knew this was virtually nature’s law.

“What shall we talk about instead, Miss Tremaine? Shall we talk about gowns? Shall we talk about the best way to serve a roast of beef?”

“If you’d like me to join the conversation, sir, perhaps we can talk about circulatory problems.” The words were innocent enough, but her eyes were glinting strangely, and her left brow had lifted in the faintest hint of challenge.

“Circulatory prob—what on earth are you running on about?”

“It seems that many diseases of middle age can be traced to circulatory problems.” She appeared to be warming to her subject.

Edelston forced himself not to splutter.

“Miss Tremaine?”

“Yes, Lord Edelston?”

“Did you enjoy my kiss the other evening?” This he asked in the patented low fierce murmur that never failed to render innocent young ladies weak with fascination. It was a desperate ploy, designed to knock the unnaturally poised Miss Rebecca Tremaine off her mark.

“Oh? Was that a kiss, Lord Edelston? I have very little experience in these things, you see, and so I could not be certain.” Again, the innocent tone, the glinting eyes, the upraised brow.

Edelston gaped at her in astonishment until he realized he was gaping and clapped his mouth shut.

“Perhaps I should demonstrate it for you again, Miss Tremaine.”

“Perhaps you should behave like a gentleman, Lord Edelston.”

“If I were a gentleman, Miss Tremaine, we would not at the moment be engaged to be married.”

Rebecca paused as though conceding the truth of this to herself and contemplated Edelston warily. “Perhaps you can demonstrate it again on our wedding day,” she said finally. An effort at diplomacy.

Edelston was lost amid the strangest exchange of words with a woman he had ever experienced, and his cool detachment and godlike profile were proving of no use whatsoever. His composure utterly deserted him, and he floundered for a way, any way, to vanquish the alien creature that stood before him.

“I hope you are aware, Miss Tremaine, that when we are married I shall be your lord and master—by
law
. I shall forbid you to discuss circulatory problems. I shall kiss you whenever I wish. I shall beat you whenever I wish. I am beginning to suspect that I may wish to beat you rather frequently.”

“I suppose you could
try
, sir.”

“And how do you propose to stop me?”

A moment later Edelston was on his back in the dust on the garden path, the breath knocked out of his lungs.

“Your friend Robbie Denslowe taught me to do that. Hook one foot behind your opponent’s knees and down he goes. The trick, however, is to take your opponent by surprise.” Rebecca’s gray-green eyes laughed down at him.

Edelston stayed on his back for a moment, staring up at that plush laughing mouth. And then something happened. The bottom seemed to drop out of his world, and yet he felt weightless, buoyant. The colors in his field of vision sharpened to a supernatural brilliance, and as he gazed up at Rebecca, transfixed, he could have sworn, as he blinked, that a nimbus of gold light outlined her head.

Edelston, for the first time in his life completely confused, out of his depth with a woman and stripped of all his defenses, could perhaps be forgiven for what he did next: he fell madly in love with Rebecca Tremaine.

Chapter Four

H
e’s writing poetry to me, now, Connor. I cannot bear it. And I’m expected to walk about with him every
day
.”

Rebecca spoke across Sultan’s back while Connor industriously applied the currycomb to Sultan’s flank.

“Poetry?” Connor repeated, amused.

“Yes, very bad poetry, as a matter of fact. He rhymed ‘rose’ with ‘nose,’ of all things.”

“What did he have to say about your nose?” Connor was curious despite himself.

“That is beside the point, Connor,” Rebecca said, exasperated. “Edelston is a boor.”

“The man is merely besotted, wee Becca. The besotted are frequently boors or figures of amusement, or both.”

“Besotted? With
me
?” Rebecca was bemused. “No one has ever been besotted with me before. Hmph. Besotted, you say? How could that be?”

“Aye, woman,
besotted
.” Connor sounded a little exasperated himself. “You told me you knocked the laddie into the dirt and then laughed at him. Could anything be more irresistible?”

Rebecca giggled. “Still, I don’t believe anyone has ever been besotted with me before. It’s rather novel.”

“What about Robbie Denslowe?”

“But he was a boy. Edelston is a man. A
baron
,” Rebecca added unnecessarily.

Connor felt another unusual fit of pique welling up. “Will you wed the lordling simply so that you may have poetry about your nose every day?”

“Good heavens, what a thought!” Rebecca looked shocked. “It’s just that it’s a novel experience. I suppose it’s flattering,” she added rather wistfully. “I have never seen myself as particularly special in anyone else’s eyes.”

“Trust me, wee Becca. You are special indeed.”

Connor kept his voice sarcastic and his face averted, so that she would laugh and not be startled by the vehement sincerity of his expression.

“Oh, Connor. I’m not sure which version of Edelston I prefer—the rude, pompous boor or the fawning, poetry-spouting boor. And he still has not grasped the art of including me in conversation. So I listen to his monologues interspersed with poetry, and every now and then, just to keep from going mad with boredom, I ask him a difficult question.”

“No doubt he appreciates the challenge, wee Becca,” Connor observed wryly.

“It
is
somewhat amusing to watch him flail about when I do it. Sometimes he becomes overbearingly gallant—during our last stroll in the garden, just to change the subject, he said he would happily face Napoleon Bonaparte with a drawn sword to defend me.”

“Ah. We should all have such gallant defenders.”

“But other times . . . well . . . he . . . ”

Something in her voice made Connor look up alertly. “What is it, wee Becca?”

“Well, truthfully, it was only the one time, and perhaps it meant nothing, which is why I did not mention it before . . .”

“
What
was ‘only the one time,’ Rebecca?”

She took a deep breath. “Edelston said it would be his right
by law
to beat me once I was his wife. And that he suspected he may wish to beat me rather frequently.” Her eyes were wide and hopeful and slightly abashed, as if she hoped Connor would find this amusing but feared he would not.

A red haze drifted over Connor’s eyes. His breath nearly stopped.

“I beg your pardon, wee Becca.” He measured each word out with great care; his voice shook almost imperceptibly. “Did you say Edelston threatened to
beat
you?”

“Well, you see . . . it was just the once. Doubtless it was because he did not want to discuss circulatory problems. He
did
also threaten to kiss me frequently.”

Connor was silent for a very long time. In his mind, he was neatly and slowly rending Edelston limb from limb, savoring the lordling’s screams.

“You don’t suppose he . . . he actually would? Beat me, that is?”

Connor’s breaths still came short and shallow; it was a struggle to speak under the weight of his rage. “Only a very weak man would threaten to beat a woman, wee Becca. Was he perhaps jesting?”

“I’m not sure Edelston knows how to jest, Connor. He takes himself very seriously. I
do
rather deliberately provoke him. Perhaps if I never spoke of circulatory problems, or the army, or . . .” She trailed off.

“. . . or anything else, for that matter,” Connor completed for her curtly. “Perhaps if you never spoke at all.”

Suddenly Sultan tossed his great black head and switched his tail, perhaps sensing the tension in the man leaning against him. Connor murmured to the horse soothingly, apologizing. And the act of soothing the animal soothed Connor a little, too.

“I do believe you would best him in any contest, regardless, wee Becca.” A weak attempt at levity.

“Oh, of course.” Rebecca shrugged. Connor smiled a little.

“And who
wouldn’t
want to discuss circulatory problems?”

“My point precisely,” Rebecca agreed sadly.

There was another dismal little silence. Funny, but there had never been any dismal little silences between the two of them before Edelston had appeared.

“Connor?” And now Rebecca’s voice was shaking, too.

“Yes, wee Becca?”

“I have tried and tried. For Papa’s sake, for everyone’s sake. I honestly have. But I think . . . I mean, I don’t think . . .”

He waited.

“Connor, I cannot marry him.”

Two pairs of eyes, gold-shot brown and clear gray-green, met and locked, in silence, for the space of perhaps a dozen heartbeats.

“Well, then, wee Rebecca,” Connor said at last, moving the comb across the horse’s flanks as though his next words were a comment on the weather and not the pivot on which her future would turn, “you shall
not
marry him.”

Oh, you bloody, bloody, bloody great fool.
“ ‘Then,’ ” Connor said, mimicking himself out loud to himself rather nastily, “ ‘you shall
not
marry him.’ Dear God in heaven.”

Connor sat morosely at the table in his quarters, the bottle of whiskey he preserved for only the most serious occasions standing at attention next to his right hand. He tipped it into his glass for the third time this evening and held it up to the light, eyeing it with grave tenderness.

“To hanging by the neck until dead,” he said, the whiskey coaxing his native morbid humor out of him, and tossed it back.

Connor did not have a plan. Thanks to an impulse this afternoon, he now had exactly eight days to decide and plan how to whisk a gently bred seventeen-year-old girl away from a dreadful impending marriage. Most likely the whisking would have to happen in the dead of night and involve the theft of a horse or two.
Now there’s something to look forward to,
he thought,
an evening filled with activity, each activity a hanging offense. A noble way to cap my checkered career.

There was, however, no question that he would do it. For somewhere during his second glass of whiskey Connor had admitted to himself that Rebecca was very likely the reason he had stayed with the Tremaines at all.

For five years, Connor’s life had been peaceful and relatively uneventful here on this remote country estate.

But from the moment he had retrieved her from the apple tree, Connor had felt somehow responsible for Rebecca. He recognized in her a kindred spirit; he knew that the reach of her soul far exceeded the confines of her circumstances, and she ricocheted more or less happily off the walls of those confines on a daily basis. Rebecca never deliberately set out to displease her mother or startle her father with her predilections, but she was nearly helpless not to. To be female and possessed of a hungry mind in 1820 England was to be cursed, indeed, Connor thought, and he had often quietly sympathized with Rebecca while wondering what on earth would become of her.

The main difference between Connor’s upbringing and Rebecca’s, however, was that the magnitude of Connor’s destiny had been pounded into him from the moment he could walk. His father had defined a template for his life, and any digression from this template was simply not tolerated; indeed, it was viciously punished. With every breath he took, it seemed, he drew in the cold, leaden immensity of responsibility. His old life had been a hand that pressed against his chest, limiting his motion, his thoughts, his spirit.

How ironic, and fitting, somehow, that a war would be the doorway to his freedom. Connor had walked away from his life at the very first opportunity, and though guilt occasionally played faintly in his mind like a half-remembered tune, he never really felt regret; in fact, each time he thought about it, he relived the rush of gratitude he had felt the day he had finally managed to slip the shackle of his birthright. Only one element of his old life had followed him into the new: Melbers, the dear, reliable, discreet old Blackburn family solicitor, sent him a small but welcome sum at the same time each year. It was Melbers’s own quiet way of protesting the brutality of the old duke. That sum should have, in fact, arrived at the end of last month. Perhaps Melbers had been preoccupied this year.

Connor had found peace and equilibrium of a sort with the Tremaines, and for this he was grateful, too. But he was twenty-nine years old now, and he felt as though he was biding his time, though for what he knew not.

Rebecca, as a woman, would never be able to simply walk away from her life. And Connor cursed the indulgence of her parents, the father who treated her with benign neglect and the mother who clucked and fussed and badgered but who had never managed to instill in Rebecca a true sense of the . . . smallness . . . of her future.

But perhaps Rebecca would be a different person if they had.

Funny, but he had always half suspected that Rebecca Tremaine would someday mean the end of his peace of mind, she of the astonishing vocabulary, courtesy of her father’s scientific journals (“Oh! My gluteus maximus!” she had exclaimed one day, after a long ride on Pepper) and embarrassing questions (“Can puppies have more than one father? Because I saw Bonnie underneath both Bruno and Glider”). He had long ago vowed never to fight another battle, but for Rebecca’s sake, he surveyed his own raw memories tonight, looking for something useful, because it appeared as though another battle was going to begin, after all.

He examined the elements of his past the way he would examine a chessboard, each piece potentially useful if maneuvered with skill. And little by little, an idea, a strategy, began to take shape. He rolled the idea around in his mind for a bit, tasting it the way he’d been savoring his fine whiskey, and thought, yes, of course, it could work, it
must
work . . .

Once accomplished, it would be off to America and a new life for Connor Riordan, the life he knew he had only been postponing here with the Tremaines.

Finally, satisfied, Connor tipped the bottle again, held his fourth and final glass of whiskey up to the fire, and toasted himself.

“To my brilliant plan,” he said wryly, and tossed the whiskey back.

Edelston’s feet had grown wings; he had not walked upon solid ground for more than a week. A laughing, green-eyed, red-haired angel-devil had liberated him of the need to eat or drink or speak to other mortals, and all he needed now was the divine pleasure of her company and a few sheets of foolscap for his poetry.
Rebecca. Rebecca. Rebecca
. It was really a pity she didn’t have a more rhymable name, but this was a surmountable obstacle, as she could be compared so easily to so many other things . . .
flowers . . . showers . . . bowers . . . hours . . . spring . . . suffering . . . inspiring . . .
it was heavenly.

Ever since that day in the garden, Rebecca had excited him peculiarly. Perhaps it was the light in her eyes when she asked her horrible startling questions, or the thrum of something he couldn’t quite identify that ran through her words when she spoke to him. It made him feel strangely unsure of himself for perhaps the first time ever, and it was an intriguing sensation. At the very least, it was an alternative to boredom. It seemed a distant, desperate memory now, his plan to rid himself of her once they were wed. Now he could not imagine ever relinquishing this maddeningly intriguing female. Fortunately, she would be his wife in a mere week.

He needed a piece of foolscap for something other than poetry, though: a brief letter that would put an end to one ongoing, regrettable circumstance, one that had proved profitable and serendipitous for him; indeed, one that had kept him afloat financially lo these many months.

From nervous habit, Edelston moved over to the wardrobe and opened the door. He reached in and felt about in the inner pocket of his overcoat, and when a reassuringly solid lump met his questing fingers, he sighed with relief. The lump was the subject of his special arrangement: it meant he was guaranteed at least one consistent source of income. The marriage settlements offered by Sir Henry Tremaine, however, had rendered this special arrangement unnecessary, and in light of the . . . er . . . warm relationship Edelston had once shared with the party involved, he felt that concluding the circumstances would be the honorable thing to do. Edelston had recently discovered honor, and he found the concept very compatible with the notion of true love.

An apology and a polite invitation to meet to conclude business was all that seemed necessary. Strange to think that another female face and body had at one time caused him fits of longing. And yet the memory seemed trivial in light of the vast celestial emotions he felt for Miss Tremaine. He wrote the letter; he posted it; he returned to his rhymes.

“Did you know, Connor, that I am a
‘creature divine, with eyes so fine, any fool would vastly prefer them to wine’
?”

“Ah. So Edelston’s poetry is . . . improving?” Connor was rubbing oil into a saddle.

“Difficult to say, isn’t it? However, I
can
tell you what isn’t improving: my
mood
. Yesterday he read the poem about my fine eyes to me aloud, and then do you know what he said to me?”

“I am all ears.”

“He said: ‘You are never so appealing as when you are listening, Rebecca.’”